The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [81]
Hm. Playtime in America might have been a wee bit … outsourced. While the policy of the League involved not picking on speakers of English as a second language, this was different. The sign had likely originated somewhere else, but it had landed in northeast Ohio, and here in an education-oriented store of all places, it was perfectly fair to address the idiom trouble that the makers of this sign had run into. I went for a clerk. Benjamin and I were the only ones in here at the moment, so I didn’t have to be shy about stealing time away from an actual customer.
When I pointed out the sign’s strange claim of “year around fun,” the clerk replied, “It just means that you can enjoy this in spring, summer, winter, or fall.” She didn’t sound like she was making fun of us, but I didn’t know what to say next.
At my silence, Benjamin stepped in, presuming that she hadn’t known what I was talking about and so, not knowing how to respond, had offered a ridiculously obvious clarification. He saw her bet: “See, the uh, problem is that it says year around fun instead of year-round, which is the usual expression.”
“Oh,” she said, looking over. “Well, I believe they’re making a pun.”
Okay. Jump ropes, hula hoops. Year around fun. Right, ha ha. I might have accepted this defense of her sign if it hadn’t had another quirk: PLAY IN DOORS & OUT. I let her pun theory pass with a quick dubious glance and switched to the other offender. “Okay, but check this out. ‘Play in … doors’? It should be ‘play indoors.’” I spoke too confidently, certain she’d have no objection here. The absurd images conjured by the typo would do my work for me, I mistakenly assumed. Talking about it later, we realized that even the two of us had interpreted it differently. Benjamin had pictured someone attempting to work a hula hoop or skip rope within the confines of a door frame. I pictured something even more literal: playing in the doors like you’d play in the playground, which is to say within it, like termites. Mom! My hula-hoop matter-phasing shut off, and I’m stuck inside the door again! To my dismay, the hula-hooping child wasn’t the only thing out of phase.
“No, I think that’s right,” the woman replied, yielding to the sign all judgment and authority. Someone had printed it and released it to the four winds, so by God, it must be right. Who were we, mere individuals, to question the will of the toy manufacturers?
“That’s definitely wrong,” I replied. Should I go into why? Should we talk about clarity of meaning? Now who would be explaining the—I’d believed—obvious?
Then she made a move that could very well have spun my opinion of her right around. She reached for a true authority to consult, a handy dictionary. I sighed in relief, ready to christen her as redeemed while she flipped to the letter i. That was the value of a store emphasizing education. In the end, education isn’t about how many facts you can cram into your head, it’s about knowing how to get the information you need. Even Conan Doyle’s polymathic detective kept encyclopedias and atlases close at hand for quick reference.*
Consider my shock when, in a vindicated tone, she declared herself right and put the dictionary nearly in my face with a smug “Look!”
We looked.
In and doors were separated by a dot. Many of the other words on that page, and the rest of the pages in the dictionary, had words broken up with dots. Though he looked somewhat peaked, Benjamin graciously accepted the weighty and irksome charge that now fell to us. “Um,” he said. “That’s a dot that separates the syllables of a word. That doesn’t mean it’s two words.”
Silence. All