The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  We drove Callie onto the ferry and then stood at the rail, watching the Gulf, as the vessel chugged on toward the island. Earlier in the day, I had booked us a room at a hostel that promised easy access to the beach. When we arrived at the place, we saw that they hadn’t been kidding; we were steps away from white sands. It was a dive hotel with a few rooms converted to hostel space, somewhat dingy, but hey, we were men of humble tastes. We gulped down the last of Abby’s scones and then pulled on our trunks (or, in Benjamin’s case, changed from jeans into shorts) for a late-afternoon dip in the ocean and some relaxation—er, I mean, a trip to ensure that the beach was free of typos. Though we did find and fix an error on the entrance sign, the excursion was more for a moment of rest for these weary travelers. I called Jane, stuck in frozen and miserable New England, from my beach towel. Benjamin, absorbed in his Frank Herbert book, didn’t even go into the water.

  Evening fell, and we realized that we still needed to do more typo hunting to justify our earlier lounging. We took off on foot and found a couple of typos in touristy locales reminiscent of Myrtle Beach, but the most memorable (and notorious) discovery of the night took place in an abandoned miniature golf course off Seawall Boulevard. We were walking back to the hostel, since Benjamin and I had thought our search to be over, but then I spied the shack with its dubious legend. From the look I caught on Benjamin’s face, he must have seen it at the same time. Together we clambered down the incline and walked over turf and concrete.

  “Arr,” I mused at the sight of the little wooden structure astride the green. DAVY JONES LOCKER, it said in painted white letters. Surely someone possessed this locker, and it was not merely named Davy Jones. A crucial mark was missing. Benjamin inquired, Watson-like, as to my implement of correction. We didn’t have a white marker of any sort. I had already fumbled for the elixir that would grant Davy Jones the soundest sleep, and I held it up for my friend. “Could be a lot of Wite-Out,” he said, hesitating, then asked the question that was really on his mind. “Is it also going to need …?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “Davy Jones isn’t a biblical figure.”

  “Could be a lot of Wite-Out,” Benjamin repeated. “You sure about this one?”

  It occurred to me that while the path of correction had seemed obvious to me, given the style book that the League had more or less chosen to follow, Benjamin was not lugging around the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition, in his brain like a mental brick. I had internalized its tenets only through the years of my academic publishing job in D.C. I couldn’t expect my companion, adept hunter though he was, to have absorbed the book’s contents purely by walking through the reference section every day.

  There is widespread confusion over what to do with these s-possessives, partly because no absolute rule exists. Different style manuals diverge where Davy Jones possesses his locker. Each style guide aligns its rules with its overall purpose. Associated Press style has the mission of eliminating anything deemed unnecessary for communicating an idea, such as the serial comma (e.g., the second comma in “Benjamin, Jeff, and Josh”). They see that same redundancy in an s following an s-apostrophe. You’re already ending on an s-sound, why add another s? The style I’d learned to use, Chicago, which is favored by the publishing industry, aimed to simplify the rules themselves; thus, Chicago would prefer to keep things consistent, adding an s after the apostrophe and thereby treating s-ending possessives like any others. (Chicago does make an exception for names from the Bible and antiquity that end in s, like Jesus or Xerxes.) The Modern Language Association (MLA) style, employed by academic writers, prefers this route as well. Though it helped that at least a couple of style guides backed my desire to use the s after the apostrophe, I knew deep down that my preference did not spring entirely from reason: I simply liked the way that JONES’S would look better than JONES’. Perhaps this was how style guide variances happened in the first place.

  After I’d explained the competing views about the s-apostrophe situation, Benjamin suggested that we could go with whichever best preserved our supplies. That, of course, would be AP style. Denied the wholehearted support I had sought, I grew defensive. “Are you at heart a spelling minimalist, old friend? Do we part ideological ways here? Is that it?”

  “Hey … I only want the simplest means to the end of correcting this typo, yo.”

  I reflected a moment more. “This could be the first time we’ve come across something with two possible corrections. For the sake of consistency—even if that’s a silly consideration for different signs in different contexts across different states—we ought to correct with Chicago. That’s what I’ve been using, more or less, so far.”

  “Okay, I’m cool with that,” he replied. We couldn’t very well switch typo-correcting parameters mid-journey, any more than a grad student could swap MLA for APA mid-thesis. I turned back to my plywood canvas and went to work. We would have to hope that the cop stationed a block away wouldn’t look over and take us for vandals. The bad kind of vandals, I mean.

  Perhaps I should have considered Benjamin’s words as a harbinger of comments soon to befall the League. I’d been proud of my handiwork afterward, the painted-on s making a respectable attempt at fitting in with its stenciled brethren. Some folks in the wider world later scrutinizing our adventures expressed their disapproval with the correction, however, especially when the Boston Globe article on us ran a week later and used the Davy Jones pictures as an example of our typo-fixing. The entry on the TEAL blog filled with comments such as these:

  You could have saved some white paint by adding only the apostrophe and not the (extra) “S”

  I too had always been taught that words ending in “s” did not receive an additional “s” when they become possessive. A little controversy with your morning coffee?

  I can state with confidence that AP style does not put the extra S on anybody, Biblical or contemporary. I think you could have saved the Wite-Out on Davy’s name.

  Associated Press Stylebook says—you need to go back to Galveston and remove the superlative [sic … did they mean superfluous?] S.

  I was perplexed at first by the criticism. I had expected everyone to agree that we’d left the Locker in a better state than we’d found it. But many of these people were acting as if we had done something wrong.* Why was everyone talking about AP? Had they confused me for a journalist? I realized, finally, that a couple of threads of misunderstanding were unspooling here.

  I had been assuming that everyone was at least aware that stylistic rules of the language could vary depending on who was using them. But now it hit me—some people, like the writers of the first two comments above, were unaware that different style guides even existed. They thought that long ago, an overlord of the English language had, with a slam of his mailed fist upon some oaken table, definitively put all grammatical questions to rest. “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” quoth he, “and that is bloody that.”

  How much I had taken for granted! Of course there’d be loads of people out there who had stopped thinking critically about grammar the day they escaped their last English teacher (the stand-in for that overlord from the misty past). Forget this, they said to themselves, I’m going to be a biochem major. If they were not bound for editorship, as I had been, they might never have had the occasion to consider the existence of—the necessity for—different approaches to the language. A journalist trying to squeeze a story into a newspaper column would naturally have different grammatical priorities from, say, a scholar writing up a journal article on the significance of the color green in Proust. The former will want her punctuation, abbreviation, and so forth to be as economical as possible. The latter will use his comma and quotation placement to elucidate his close textual analysis. So you give the journalist an AP Style Guide to inform her work, and you advise the scholar to use the MLA Handbook. Medical writers have still different needs, so they’ll find the APA Guide helpful, and so forth. Fiction and mainstream nonfiction writers will mostly
turn to the Chicago Manual. In fact, the vast majority of books on the North American market are edited according to Chicago rules. A bibliophilic fellow such as myself would naturally gravitate toward such a style.

  Which brings me to the other type of comments left in regard to the Davy Jones correction, the ones that chided me for not using AP style, of all things. This mentality is, in a way, more pernicious than simply not knowing about the plurality of style guides. Its proponents are aware that different rulebooks exist, but for whatever reason, they insist that one particular guide is king of all, and any others should be discarded. Consider this argument another wedge served from the malodorous pie known as “My Way Is Right,” the dessert of choice for politicians, religious leaders, and warring pastry chefs.

  If some other marauder had gotten to the Locker first, and had chosen to make Davy Jones possessive per AP style, I would have no problem with that. TEAL is not about elevating one style guide over the other. The point is that any correction, regardless of the stylebook, is better than leaving the thing wrong. Whether it’s Davy Jones’s Locker or Davy Jones’ Locker, kindly acknowledge the fact that we have improved on “Davy Jones Locker.”

  The one argument that I will consider was offered by someone claiming that Chicago also calls for withholding the extra s in the case of mythical figures (which probably pertains more to classical heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, but who knows, may extend to folk legends).* The rest of the angry commenters must clomp back to the Barony of the Trolls, where the Internet’s full-time instigators dwell.

  In the morning we decided to make a stop or two in the little downtown of the island. Benjamin had discovered a flyer in our room for a used-book store that sounded enticing. We stopped in and bought a few more books for the road from their enviable sci-fi and fantasy collection. Other genres were, shall we say, less well represented. Namely, their “Horor” and “Tecno-Spy” genres. When we came down to the desk with our respective stacks of great finds, I asked if we could do something about the typos. A resounding “Definitely!” came from the woman behind the desk as she handed me her marker, cementing the place’s status as my new favorite bookstore. Last night we’d started our hunt as the sun dropped out of sight, but today we’d already scored a hit well before high noon.

  After stowing our book haul, we headed for the post office, housed in the lobby of a federal courthouse of impressive proportions. On the courthouse lawn I found an engraved sign with a small problem. They’d spelled METEOROLOGICAL wrong, leaving out the first o. While Benjamin got in line to mail a present back to Jenny, I went off to see if I could alert the town fathers to the error. I walked alone down the vast and echoing hall and came to a security gate manned by a white-haired guard. I said, through the gate, “Hello there. I noticed a typo on the sign on the lawn outside, and I was wondering who I should talk to about having it fixed?”

  I turned my camera on and found the appropriate picture in its memory, then handed it over to show him. He accepted the camera through the gate, which began beeping at the intrusion of a metal object. I said, “See how meteorological is missing an o?”

  He nodded. “Yep. But they’d need an engraver to fix that, and the way this town spends money, I don’t think it’s likely to happen.”

  Well, he’d know best. Though disappointed, I could not have even feigned surprise that this one had gotten by us. “All right, thanks for your time.”

  “One other thing,” the old sentinel added, as he handed me back my camera, this time around the gate. “You want to be more careful with this camera. Taking pictures of the inside or outside of a courthouse is a federal offense.”

  “But my picture was of a sign on the lawn of the courthouse,” I said. “Not of the courthouse itself.”

  He shook his head. “They …,” and he let the word linger, either considering his next words or making a thoughtful distinction, “… could still construe it as the courthouse, and confiscate your camera. So don’t take any pictures around here. Especially not of the inside!”

  Thanks for the tip, I thought. Maybe such a policy existed, and he was showing me mercy, this man bound by the iron fetters of bureaucracy. Or maybe he was feeding me an extra helping of tripe. At the time, I just didn’t know. I said, “Thanks,” and scurried back outside.

  Both this incident and the affair of the Locker struck me as examples of a peculiar kind of blindness or, perhaps more accurately, nearsightedness: fixating upon one stately elm while missing the proverbial forest behind it. For the style-guide naifs, and the AP-style devotees, their tree was assumptions about language convention that they had never thought to question. For the federal overseers, it was security at all costs, laying down rules with a rational premise and then enforcing them to the point of paranoia. Galveston boasts a beautiful courthouse, and I’m guessing that not everyone who wants to take pictures of it is a terrorist. Though, in fairness, at least I still have my camera, which the guard could have confiscated.

  Ahh, but all hunters must take care not to fall victim to their own weapons. Visual impediment is a hazard of typo hunting itself, since the sport is about zooming in on the little details of our surroundings, focusing on elements that are oft taken for granted while ignoring the broader purposes of their existence. Woe to any who entered that bookstore and saw only the “horor” of misspelled words, but missed that glorious fantasy and sci-fi selection! I vowed that in my quest, I would never lose sight of the spirit of whatever text I came across, or whatever institution fate brought my way.

  I wish that there weren’t an unhappy postscript to the tale of Galveston, but there is, as Erik Larson perhaps foresaw. Add this doomed island to New Orleans and Biloxi as victims of Hurricane Alley. Some six months after our visit, Ike would tear through the Texas coast and leave behind stacks of kindling and bare patches where houses used to be. Anything on the Bolivar Peninsula was pretty much flattened, so say farewell to Anal City. Our beachside hostel-in-a-motel, a grubby Galveston icon for almost fifty years, met ruin. Davy Jones’(s) Locker, subject of so much impassioned debate, is now purely a symbol, as the hurricane obliterated the actual plywood structure, along with the rest of the abandoned putt-putt course. Storms and tides hammered that wonderful bookstore (though it has since been remodeled and reopened, thankfully).

  The courthouse, however, remains intact. You’ll have to stop by and see its engraved sign, on the lawn at 25th and F. Leave your camera at home.

  There is not much I can say about the ravages of nature that would not also, necessarily, apply to the impermanence of all things. The city is rebuilding itself, but a fair portion of what we saw and touched there is gone forever. That casual annihilation may make our efforts seem especially futile, but the bare fact is this: any sign that we noted along the entire trip could be gone tomorrow. Maybe the actual moment of noticing, of caring, is itself the important part, regardless of what may come after.

  TYPO TRIP TALLY

  Total found: 61

  Total corrected: 34

  * See also chapter 10.

  * Copyeditor’s note: Chicago doesn’t specify omitting the extra s in names of mythical figures per se, but only those ending with an eez sound, or in cases where it would make the result look and sound odd. (Chicago considers the way a thing would sound when read aloud; see its section on handling of inclusive numbers.) It also takes into account customary usage; thus Achilles’ Euripedes’, Rameses’, but also Isis’, Moses’, Odysseus’, Jesus’. Davy Jones’s would not qualify for this exception.

  9 | Typos Aren’t Charming

  March 26–27, 2008 (Santa Fe, NM, to Flagstaff, AZ)

  Discloses how the Mission, too long masticated, began losing its flavor. Happily for the palate, vibrant Southwestern towns offer a distinct savor all their own. Conflict arises between the Grammatical Champion, wavering with contradictory feelings, and his Faithful Dawg, obstinate to the last.

  As I stepped out of the hostel bunk room and onto the back porch, a couple
of the donkeys raised their heads to acknowledge me. They ambled about on the sandy ground, munching at whatever lay conveniently nearby: a leafy branch, a stray shoot of grass, the wooden railing behind which I stood. It took a moment to reconcile the sudden appearance of five donkeys with the fact that I was awake—not that I dream about donkeys often. I considered the possibility that they were a missive from the divine lords of language, a reminder to stubbornly stick to my mission. I’d faltered in Albuquerque last night upon spotting a typo beyond reach, but Benjamin had swiftly identified a supervisor to assist us. Kelly’s Brew Pub need no longer endure the city’s ridiculing them with an extra e, as “Kelley’s” had appeared in a municipal sign directly beneath their own sign. Once I saw how we had helped a thin ray of brilliance to shine down on the pub’s dark night of orthography, I wondered why I had hesitated at all. As I reflected, one bull attempted to mount a less-than-enthusiastic partner. No, best not to look for directives here.

  Benjamin joined me on the porch. He shook off his initial surprise and broke into an excited smile. “All right! We can do this in style! Let’s saddle up for Santa Fe,” he said, reaching over the rail to pet the nearest donkey on the head.