The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [77]
“Let’s keep the written separate from the spoken for now,” Benjamin said.
“Some of these arguments are going to cross over,” I said.
“Yeah, but TEAL’s mission is focused on the written word, and we should zoom in on that stuff. You even said it on NPR.” When my story had been featured on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, they’d pulled a sound bite from me on how written mistakes can linger forever while a verbal remark disappears into the ether. “Lots of the mistakes we’re finding are specifically written mistakes that aren’t about language at all. They’re about the mechanics of our written system, the sound-symbol correspondence, the way we add the suffix to the root on paper. Those are the ones I got kinda intense about when I hit the library. Am I making any sense?”
Two separate levels of symbolism were at work here. Language, the oral process, is a single level all by itself. Somehow, in our separate tribes, we’ve agreed upon sounds to represent most every conceivable thing, action, descriptive detail, et cetera (or “ect” if you prefer). The sounds dog and blue are not onomatopoeic, like vroooom or whoooosh—they don’t have any connection to what they represent beyond the significance we’ve given them. This first level is innate to our species. Babies naturally acquire and then begin to utilize spoken language, both the lexicon and grammatical patterns of a given language.
The use of written symbols to represent the sounds we make, and the combination of those symbols to create the word-units, is a second and very different level. The written word follows behind the oral, but written language is not a natural creation. It has to be taught to us. This is why failing our kids on the educational front leads to illiterate but not mute children. When children can’t—or won’t—speak, we assume something’s physiologically or psychologically wrong with them.
I looked up and caught a massive sign for MILWUAKEE FURNITURE. The letters were definitely bigger than the Arizona billboard apostrophe, making this the physically largest error yet. The Chicago Tribune reporter who’d been shadowing us for the last few blocks nodded appreciatively; there was an error worthy of the paper. Benjamin shot me a glance: See, there’s another one. This wasn’t about language change. It was specifically an editorial problem, an issue with the written word, an error born of inattention.
Stick to what we’re actually doing, Benjamin had suggested. TEAL concerned itself only with the written word. No wonder both Hawk and Hippie perspectives felt wrong. I’d brought checkers onto the chessboard. After spending time with Josh the Hawk and Jane the Hippie, I’d gotten too spun around by the extremes when so much of that debate didn’t apply to TEAL.
“I personally,” Benjamin confessed, “have descriptivist leanings. Your mission certainly feels prescriptivist. Like I said, it’s not something a laissez-faire descriptivist could have come up with.” On the Kinsey scale of linguistic orientation, he suggested the following: Josh = 0, Jeff = 2 (though I’d perhaps started as a 1), Benjamin = 4, and Jane = 6. What I’d first thought of as zeros and ones was in reality zeros and sixes. I’d missed the whole range in the middle.
“So let’s figure out what TEAL is really about,” I said, “and that will naturally be the middle path.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Benjamin replied. “I have trouble admitting it, but this typo hunt is a blast.”
“Thanks.”
“Though it’s not the typos themselves I care about,” Benjamin said. “For me, it’s mostly about—” A barking ball of stir-crazed energy drowned out the rest. We found ourselves in the furniture-chewed apartment of our Bloomington host.
“Uh, I didn’t quite catch that,” I said.
Benjamin shook his head. “Forget it. Wasn’t important.”
Even so, I hated when that happened. Which got me thinking. “Everyone deserves to be understood,” I declared.
“What’s that?”
“What TEAL’s really about.”
He looked like he’d just downed one of the apocryphal eight spiders annually consumed by the average person. “First,