by Jeff Deck
How did we get here? First I had to take a hard look at the siege engine I had set grinding toward the citadel of English. What was the League about, really? Not the idealized form in my head, but its literally stated goals, and our practices in carrying them out. The original mission statement read, in part:
[S]lowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.
There was no room for subtlety or individual expression in those words. It was a call to war. I had created a dread automaton that chugged along according to inexpertly programmed instructions. I could see now how in line Josh was with our mission according to its very definition. As in every other aspect of his journey, he had jumped into typo hunting with surpassing vigor. He had overfixed the chalkboard because that meant extra points, giving a 110 percent effort to the mission. Josh wasn’t the traitor to the cause. I was.
No wonder I had gotten so many puzzlingly fanatical comments on the blog from people who decried the decline of America through bad spelling, who wanted me to correct the way that people talked as well as the way that they wrote. No wonder Wolman had assumed that I’d be a hardliner until he’d met me. The League was carrying out the dream of hardliners everywhere. That wasn’t what I’d intended at all. I had sought to overstate things a bit in the mission statement, to recognize through self-parodying pomposity that my journey bordered on the absurd; e.g., referring to typos as “vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language.” I hadn’t expected anyone to nod gravely at my words, missing the hyperbole.
Josh’s approach to YOU GOT A FRIEND IN BOOZE was perfectly consistent with his previous actions. He had displayed a straightforward approach to typo hunting from the start. Back in L.A., when I’d pointed out a fuel pump label that said HARMFUL OR FATAL IS SWALLOWED, he was unimpressed until I went around and corrected each instance of the error on all seven pumps. It was a concrete task for him, a checklist in which each box must be filled in completely with a No. 2 pencil. Fix every occurrence, change every wrong into right, and then you can have your beer. Upon noticing how often we ran into “owners expense” signs, Josh proclaimed them the “bread and butter of TEAL,” seeing each instance as basically another job to be done. Now I realized the implications of this functional approach to language: Josh was a prescriptivist.
The popular perception of English-y folks, or language nerds, is that we are a fairly monolithic group of preposition-obsessed finger-waggers. But bitter ideological divides are a characteristic of every field of interest, and spelling and grammar are no exception. O how the fires of battle rage between the two camps of dogma! To all those who ordinarily give change junctions no more than a passing thought—beware!
The Prescriptivist is typified by Lynne Truss and the Old Guard of English conventions, columnists in the tradition of William Safire, and many language-based humorists. Call this one the Grammar Hawk. The Hawk swings and punches in the cause of linguistic tradition, i.e., the way that we’ve habitually been spelling and punctuating words for a long time. The philosophy here is that there is one proper way to go about orthography, and one way only: what the dictionary and grammar textbooks instruct us to do. These are the standards that have arisen from consensus and that provide the greatest clarity in writing. The Hawk tells people how they should spell.
The Descriptivist represents most academics (linguists, English professors, cognitive scientists) and dictionary staff. We can call him the Grammar Hippie, for he advocates a passive, observational approach to spelling and grammar. The Hippie merely notes how people do spell, here and now. They refer to “Standard” English rather than “correct” English because many equally valid variations exist; Standard English possesses no absolute, data-proven superiority over other dialects. All of orthography’s supposed conventions and rules are ultimately subjective, sometimes even with oppressive agendas behind them. Language is in a continual state of growth and flux.
I hadn’t thought about this conflict much when starting out on the mission—I’d been focused on my own personal interpretation of what typos were, of when to consider something an error. Now that I was forced to examine it, typo hunting looked completely antithetical to Grammar Hippie beliefs, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the pure Grammar Hawk approach, either. Black and white could not by themselves paint the complex portrait of American English. (Or rather, North American English, here in the dark streets of Vancouver.) Ideally, people would see the nuances, would recognize that something like lonley would never be right, but that they were free to bend their speech to a certain degree in the service of dialect and individual character, that indeed such practices were healthy and necessary to the ongoing evolution of a language. However, everyone ended up choosing one side or the other, donning either the feathers of the Hawk or the tie-dye of the Hippie.
Even the triumph of the Cartoon Art Museum corrections seemed sour now, considering the mass bullying it had taken to get anything done. I’d needed to resort to an unsubtle, Hawklike maneuver; I couldn’t imagine marshaling the troops on a regular basis. For a moment I feared that TEAL’s entire mission was misguided on some fundamental level—or even futile, like flinging thimblefuls of water onto a beached whale. One typo correction at a time hardly seemed an adequate pace for bringing about a better world.
Coming back to the present, where Josh still fixed me with challenging eyes, I capitulated. I let the hated ’ve stand on the sign, and we moved on. We grabbed some mediocre Japanese food and headed back to the hotel, and I spent a restless night thinking about what I’d become.
Before departing the next day, Josh wanted to buy some Canadian beer to bring back with us across the border. The shop we chose turned out to be overpriced, but that was not its sole failing: one sign proclaimed a particular vintage A DELIGHTFUL WINE JUST TO SIP ON IT’S OWN.
That morning, I’d seen a restaurant marquee promising GREEK FOOD AT IT’S BEST. I was beginning to think that Canadians had as much trouble with the its/it’s thing as Americans. But who could blame them? Its/it’s confusion is one of the most common and pervasive types of errors in modern English. We’re taught that apostrophes go with possessives like fish with chips, and so when making it possessive, the natural choice is to add that obligatory apostrophe. Oh, but our instincts betray us! Its is different thanks to its status as a pronoun, much like his or her (e.g., Josh Roberts at his best). It’s can only mean it is. The apostrophe’s dual role as both possessive-maker and contraction-maker causes a conflict of interest here, which nineteenth-century printers did not adequately take into account when cementing apostrophe rules in the first place. The distinction is stupid and arbitrary, yes, and until someone comes up with a better idea, we can at least take comfort from knowing that it’s the fault of long-dead printers and not us.
All three members of the liquor store staff were watching me with cold and suspicious eyes. One of them approached and asked if she could help me. I told her that she could, actually, and pointed out the it’s.
Her reaction was frosty. “Does it really matter?”
“It does,” I said. I held back from explaining the mission, from elaborating beyond those simple two words. Suddenly I didn’t feel like identifying myself by the greater scale of my efforts. I didn’t want to be a Grammar Hawk in her eyes. “Do you mind if I fix it? I can just make the s bigger to absorb the apostrophe.”
“No, no, don’t worry about it. See you later.”
I didn’t need the boot physically in my butt to get the picture. I left the place and reported my failure to Josh outside, as we walked on from the shop. He said, “Well, you didn’t tell them about your journey. That’s why they didn’t listen.”
“I want them to care,” I said. “Without the gimmick.”
“They don’t care without the gimmick.”
Of course th
ey don’t, I thought darkly. I would revisit this exchange with my friend Frank the next day, during a stymied attempt at the Space Needle. Shouldn’t they care that there’s a mistake, even without the funny story? I’d ask. And Frank’s reply: They need the story as a reason to care. Otherwise, you’re just a guy pointing out a mistake.
But that was supposed to be the important part. The ridiculous acronym, the animated map with its bouncing cartoon heads, the florid words of the blog, even the crossing of thousands of miles in the name of punctuation—those were all trappings, frosting, not the point itself. In each moment, I was just a guy pointing out a mistake. The point of the mission was to inspire other ordinary people to speak out when they see mistakes. The prospect of that actually happening had never looked so dim.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 213
Total corrected: 123
* The restaurant closed its doors the following year—though probably our note didn’t have anything to do with it. Portland experienced what alt-weekly Willamette Week called a “Restaurant Apocalypse” starting in late 2008 and lost many great independent spots, thanks to the economy tanking.
13 | Run-Time Errors
April 22–25, 2008 (Cataldo, ID, to Rapid City, SD)
At long last, the romantic reunion of our Champion and his demure, computer-literate Sweetheart. They turn Eastward and begin the long course home. If only she didn’t believe his mission was utterly Pointless.
The afternoon should have been perfect. Underneath my feet, green grass struggled into spring. Snow-crowned, evergreen-carpeted mountains speared a blue sky studded with clouds, and Jane was at my side, tresses fluttering in the breeze. A thawed pond lay beyond bare trees preparing to bloom. It still wasn’t warm enough to shed our winter coats, but we could at least leave them open. The undulating landscape had been nothing short of stunning on the drive here. I could enjoy all this with the girl I’d waited so long to see, so what was the problem?
“Issac I. Stevens,” that was what.
“Hey, Jeffbear,” said Jane. “You’re squeezing my hand.”
Josh and Jane and I had spent the weekend in Seattle, temporarily joining forces for typo hunting. Yesterday Josh had caught a plane home to New York, and Jane and I had struck east, stopping last night at the dubious way station known as Spokane. She brought a much different vibe to TEAL than had her predecessors, and not only because she was my girlfriend. At corrective crossroads where Josh would have been unyielding, and Benjamin kinetically aggressive, Jane chose to be accommodating. She grew up as the middle child in her family, consequently becoming well versed in mediation and compromise. Her chief objective in any given situation was for everyone to get along and not feel unhappy. Obviously, typo hunting ran rather against these conditions, so Jane preferred not to do the aggravating of others herself, instead standing back and offering conciliatory suggestions when my observations ignited somebody’s ire. Often she ended up performing a valuable function missing from the heretofore testosterone-dominated League: a voice of reason.
The sign featuring the seemingly odious name “Issac I. Stevens” stood along one of the paths through the grounds at the Cataldo historic site, a mission house used long ago for the Christianizing of native peoples in the area. I’d gotten a vague hint from a guy at a gas station back in Coeur d’Alene that this would be a fine place for Jane and me to stop and eat our sandwiches, before pressing on to the day’s destination across the Montana border, Missoula. The site had turned out to be a fine diversion, but I’d already spotted a couple of obvious typos in and around the mission house, and now there was this one. The sign listed a few of the notable historical figures who may have crashed for the night in the guest house—fun facts, but didn’t misspelling the first name of the governor of the old Washington Territory muddy the educational aspect a bit?
“This is a classic screwup,” I muttered. “So many people mix up the s and the a. Could be that the double a feels unnatural to modern English speakers. I remember back in junior high, one of my classmates—who would go on to become valedictorian, no less—proudly showed me the glossy cover that he’d designed for his report for science class, and there it was. ‘Issac Newton.’ Even back then, it jumped out at me as wrong.”
Something more interesting had caught Jane’s attention during this musing, a pretty bird or the sun glinting off the surface of the water, but now she nodded and took a look at the sign again. “Well,” she said, “keep this in mind: if Washington State was still a territory when this guy was around, it had to be a while ago.”
“True.”
“Could he have spelled his name that way? It could have been a variation on the name back then.”
At first this rationale struck me as suspiciously similar to the one that a park ranger had trotted out for me back at a reconstruction of an old mining town in the southern California desert. One store had promised STATIONARY on its marquee, clearly intended to be an advertisement for its goods and not an indicator of its mobility or lack thereof. When I brought the sign up to the ranger, he had said dismissively, “That must be how they spelled ‘stationery’ back in the Old West.” That had been mere days after “St. Frances of Assissi,” the so-called Spanish spelling. Apathy masqueraded as an awareness of language change and divergence. Granted, names could change their spellings over time. My own first name is an update of the Old English name Geoffrey (e.g., that lewd rascal Chaucer). In this case, though, sorry—they didn’t spell it like that back then. Here, I already knew that Sir Isaac Newton, whose birth had preceded Governor Stevens’s by a couple of centuries, was an Isaac, thus I knew that “Issac” was not historically the norm. Or, of course, I could look further back, to the biblical origin of the name, and at least by the King James translation, he was a double-a-not-double-s kind of kid.
But hold on—Jane had suggested that it might have once been a variation, not the standard, and that was entirely possible. In the next state over, Montana, visitors to Glacier National Park could stay at the Izaak Walton Inn, named in honor of a seventeenth-century fisherman. Today you can find all sorts of mad alternate spellings of names not long ago regarded as canon, such as Michael (Micheal, Michale—or Makayla for girls). Probably at least a few Issacs roamed the nation at this very moment. What I had to figure out was whether this Issac, Governor Stevens of the Territory of Washington, had actually been an Issac. I suspected he wasn’t, but Josh wasn’t around to confirm this via his handy-dandy traveling Internet, which I also wasn’t willing to put full faith in since the Jonathan Swift botch in Portland. I said to Jane that she could be right, and we soon got back on the road to press on to Montana.
I thought about the Issac-Isaac question all day, though, and even verifying later on the Internet that, yes, the late Governor Stevens did go by Isaac did nothing to quell my growing unease. I became irritable. That night, after the kids at the Missoula Pita Pit botched our order, I savaged them in the blog, both for their poor customer service and the fact that they worked in a place with HER’S written on the bathroom door. Jane got irritable at my irritability, and we skipped our customary evening session of the popular card game Phase 10 and went to bed.
Jane and I endured some long, desolate drives on our journey through the northern Great Plains, and the road from Missoula to Billings was no exception. Indigo mountains were nice, rolling plateaus and fields were cool, but even pleasing scenery can grow monotonous and lonely after a few hours. Such a drive offered plenty of time to reflect and ponder, especially when my fetching companion took a turn behind the wheel. Somewhere in the lower tract of Montana, I began to realize why the Issac business bothered me so much—what makes Isaac more “correct” than Issac? It was a slipperier question than it appeared. We regard Isaac as the standard spelling for the name, treasured as the Truth of this particular patch of the given-name landscape. It was in the Bible, no? Except that Isaac is an Anglicized version of a Hebrew name. The original is Yishamacr;q, so what is Isaac?
It’s a variation, a noodling of Yishamacr;q into English. The translation could have turned out as Issac instead. The study of people’s names, anthroponomastics, can yield histories as long and twisted as, well, the word anthroponomastics.
Then something else occurred to me. I’d gotten used to hashing these kinds of things out with my old buddy Benjamin, echoing the dialectic rhythms of our days as roommates, but somehow I’d failed to solicit help from the one closest to me. Here Jane had come all this way to join me in my crazy mission, even now giving me a rest from the wheel, yet she hadn’t been included. She’d done her Jane thing of being there for everyone else without voicing her opinion. I suspected that I hadn’t asked her to voice one because I thought I knew what she’d say, and it wouldn’t be what I wanted to hear. “Jane?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What do you think makes double-a Isaac more ‘correct’ than double-s Issac?” I asked.
Jane had gone into a kind of trance herself; now she lowered her speed from ninety-five miles per hour to a more reasonable ninety. “Mmmm, I don’t think it is, necessarily. I mean, whatever the guy’s name is, that’s his name, so if someone else writes it down wrong, then bzzzt—wrong answer. But I don’t think one’s better than another.”
“So … what about words that aren’t someone’s name? Where there’s no one person to decide the right version.”
Jane shrugged. I waited her out, and she smiled one of those self-conscious smiles that comes from knowing someone’s staring at you. I certainly wasn’t going anywhere. “Um, okay. Well, to be honest, that’s why I don’t really see the point of your mission, Jeffs. Who’s to say what spelling is right, if the version that you’re insisting on is historically as arbitrary as the ‘typo’ version?”
That had been harder than I’d expected—on me. I didn’t want to argue against her, but rather, explain my position, since she’d so carefully mentioned that she didn’t see the point. “It’s … it’s still important to make the distinction,” I said. “Because we all have to agree on one of the versions. For clarity.”