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By Root 449 0

drift off, not yet. I suppose I ought to be grateful to Miracle on Main Street for bringing my attention to something that should have been obvious to me from the start: that “year around fun” means fun through spring, summer, winter, and fall. No, wait: that my mission had at its very foundation an eye toward education. How had I been able to count on this many mistakes, knowing that I could find at least one daily? More than probability was at work, and more than a casual malaise. Was spelling and grammar education missing a few pieces? As much as TEAL had decided to act as editors rather than “defenders” of the English language, our treatment of perceived mistakes was only half the story. Before people could make mistakes, or not, they still had to learn the basic mechanics of spelling and grammar. As we collected more typos, we thought we saw evidence that these essentials weren’t being fully acquired by the populace.

The contrast between what I’d found and what I’d expected to find gave me my first clue. I’d thought I would find a greater variety of typos. Sure, misspellings had caught my eye originally, and I’d known from the start that apostrophes would be problematic. Still, I’d imagined myself dealing with some of the more nuanced rules, earning thanks for explaining, “Couple is a tricky word. Like number, all, and none, these subjects can be singular or plural depending on context. While a couple (say, a couple of the toddlers in the room) could hold still for a picture you’re taking, in this case, the couple holds still. This couple functions as a single unit that happens to consist of two people in love, while the couple of toddlers are separate entities. The versus a is usually a good hint.” Even Benjamin, who hadn’t known if I was serious about the mission, had identified subject-verb disagreement as his archnemesis, and homophones as his weakness. We’d seen fewer than a dozen homophones, and the barest suggestions of subject-verb disagreement.

By the time we reached Ohio, TEAL had already caught more than three hundred typos. What we’d found first was lack of apostrophic confidence and then misspellings galore. It was the misspellings, Benjamin had explained, that brought him back. He’d seen a pattern, as if he were Alan Turing. Many of the problems were oral-to-written conversion problems. Even the apostrophe fits in here since there’s often no difference between the sound of the plural (watermelons taste great but peaches are better) and the possessive (a watermelon’s seeds get everywhere, but the peach’s pit is easy to deal with). With misspellings, intelligent people obviously knew the word they wanted and knew how to use it properly, but they just didn’t know how to spell it. So we knew where the problem was, and Benjamin hoped the specific examples we’d found would point to why.

As previously noted, English appears to be quite a mess. One could make vulgar analogies about the way it allows words from other languages to, um, enter into its own lexicon. But English’s ability to continually assimilate and grow is also a strong argument for its genius and beauty—and could even be a factor in its increasing dominance in world affairs. Certainly it improved our word selection to have similar words come in from different languages. Take a word like kill. Deriving ultimately from the Germanic küllen, it’s a short, punchy word that serves the basic idea of ending something’s life. It has a brutal and blunt sound. But if we’re talking about legally sanctioned killing, we don’t want to sound brutal, so we turn to the more technical execute, derived from Latin by way of Old French, which was long the language of law in Norman-conquered England (as mentioned in chapter 13). For other specialized contexts, we can employ words such as assassinate, which hails (in corrupted form) from Arabic. In spite of foreign influxes, written English remains about 84 percent phonetically logical. The thing is, the words we found during our trip didn’t seem as though they came from the 16-percent exception side of the aisle.