The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [76]
“Point to you,” my companion conceded. “But ad instead of and, like we saw in the Atlanta parking garage, isn’t language change. I doubt Las Vegas’s extra s in greatest is going to catch on because I have never heard anyone say ‘greastest’. These are errors, unquestionably. Language change is so gradual that it’s mostly invisible.” In Watching English Change, Laurie Bauer notes that most specific changes can only be pointed to after the fact, and more amusingly, that the one real sign of shifting meanings or spellings at the time is the complaints of Hawks trying (and failing) to stop them. “How about that ‘seafoood’ back in New Mexico? Come on, man.
“And what about people’s names?” he added as I made corrections to CAPTAIN BEEFHART and JIMMY BUFFET. “That’s not how Jimmy Buffett spells his own name, so end of story.”
My thoughts returned to e.e. cummings. Didn’t the true sovereigns of the language often buck literary conventions that didn’t serve them? Shakespeare invented words at his convenience. Kerouac had his own style of punctuation that made sense for his writings. Twain, who pushed for some spelling reforms of his own, used true phonetic representations of words to re-create the accents of his characters. Cummings used all of those tricks and more to force people to read his work exactly as he wanted them to. Even if you can’t fake a passable Russian accent, reading the poem “kumrads die because they’re told)” aloud will force you into one.
“Kids in school need to get the basics straight so that they can experiment wisely,” Benjamin replied. “There’s a huge difference between using sentence fragments like Hemingway, for effect, and using them erratically and inelegantly because you don’t know how to construct a basic sentence. This is the part that the Hawks would get right if they stuck to concerns about clarity—without limiting expression.”
Rules that aided the clarity of a sentence had an internal logic, like the rule about where to place antecedents (nouns being referred to by some other word) to avoid pronoun confusion. “When he took a deep sniff of the black marker, Benjamin deduced that Jeff needed a break from typo hunting.” This is not a great sentence because the pronoun he could refer to two possible antecedents—either Benjamin or Jeff. So who sniffed the marker? Did Benjamin take the sniff and thus gain deductive powers? Here’s a clearer sentence: “When Jeff took a deep sniff of the black marker, Benjamin deduced that his friend needed a break from typo hunting.” Note that I cut the pronoun out of the picture altogether—if I’d said “Benjamin deduced that he needed a break,” it would still be unclear which guy the he referred to.
Guidelines masquerading as rules, on the other hand, operated from caprice rather than logic, like the one about not starting sentences with but, and, or because. That might help elementary schoolers avoid mistaking dependent clauses for sentences, but later on, no one remembered to tell the kids to remove those training wheels. “Because of that prohibition, I couldn’t fully utilize because,” I pointed out. The outer fringes of the vast dorsal mantle of Chicago oozed onto the horizon. “Besides, people speak in sentence