The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [92]
Seems, Madam! nay, it is; I know not “seems.”
Okay, so now she’d passed the buck and projected her apathy onto everyone else, as if signs only became the store’s responsibility after multiple complaints had stacked up on her desk into a thickness sufficient to be bound and sold here: Please Fix Your Signs Already, by Your Customers (2008). I hoped it was merely the idea of having to do the work herself that had made her react so negatively, and so I offered to take care of the mistakes myself, presenting a phial of elixir to vouch for my sincerity.
“No, we’ll take care of it,” she lied. Upon hearing how unconvincing she sounded, she switched lies. “The volunteer’s going to be making new versions of those signs anyway.”
I’d heard all of these lines before, but never in such rapid succession, out of the same mouth. We’d gotten a bravura performance in the unlikeliest place; perhaps the bookstore clerk had missed her true calling on the stage. Benjamin laughed as soon as we hit the sidewalk. “Wow! You’d think she’d been following the blog to have come up with all those!”
“What was the problem?” I nearly shouted. “I mean, why? I don’t understand why she wouldn’t at least let me white out that apostrophe?”
“She could be an agent of FLAME,” Benjamin offered.
The rain—or perhaps reign—of errant apostrophes continued to sluice onto our sunny day. We caught a whole row of plural apostrophes trapped in one sign behind glass. The juice bar hadn’t even opened for business yet, and already it drowned under the weight of excess punctuation. I wished it good luck and better proofreading as we continued on along the street.
No quarrel with apostrophes would be complete, however, without at least one confusion of it’s and its. We stared at the dry-erase board, set on an easel outside the storefront of the Benton Shoe Company, which was NOW IN IT’S 16TH YEAR. Okay, this could be an easy fix. They’d let us wipe out that apostrophe, right? Before I even thought about it, my finger had stretched out toward the board, touching it, trying to wipe the little mark away. It failed to disappear. At that moment an employee popped through the front doorway, having noticed us staring at the sign. As much as I’d insisted on no stealth corrections, I’d been caught failing at one. “It’s the it’s,” I said lamely. “It should be its.”
“Without an apostrophe,” Benjamin clarified.
She must have been the person who’d written the sign—months ago, for the dry-erase marker had dried and become permanent. Her initial reply, without the defensive tone that the words implied, was, “I never promised that I was brilliant.” She said it with a casual shrug, but she didn’t slam the door in our faces. I wondered if we still had a chance at this one, as bad as we’d already made the situation, and as miserable and—dare I say—nightmarish as Elm Street had become. “An apostrophe,” I said, “that we can’t rub off—it won’t come out.”
“Here,” she said, perhaps taking pity on us, “I know.” She reached for my Typo Correction Kit, and I offered her the closest color, which didn’t match the sign. She shrugged this detail off as well. “That’s all right.” Then, with my marker, she turned the apostrophe into a little star. Next she added another star to the board, and another, and another. She’d made a parallelogram constellation, or quadruple fireworks for the store’s obsidian anniversary. The apostrophe had been hidden amid the decorations. She handed back my dry-erase marker and with a quick, quirky smile, she zipped back into the store, humming a quiet tune to herself. No, she’d never promised to be brilliant—she’d just proven it.
“Dude,” Benjamin said, “that was freaking amazing.”
I wished, when I’d started the trip, that I’d had the foresight to create some kind of awards. “For Excellence & Creativity in Eradication, I award you this beribboned Typo Correction Kit.” Our fortunes had reversed course. As we moved farther down the street, I bounded nearly as high as Benjamin normally does.
Another dry-erase board with a problem greeted