by Jeff Deck
She gave me a doubtful look. “Clarity. Uh-huh. Would anyone not get that Issac was supposed to be Isaac? Would it affect their comprehension of that sign? I know that stuff like that will always bug you, because you know how the dictionary would spell it. But as long as everybody basically understands each other, then dang, what’s the problem?” She patted my leg to take the edge off dang, which was strong language for her. “When you’re writing the code for a computer program, you can potentially make a few different kinds of errors. Run-time errors will cause bad glitches or freezes, and compilation errors prevent the program from even running in the first place. Logic errors, on the other hand, aren’t as bad—they can at least get through the compiler. You’ll get some funky results, but … I feel like these typos are little logic errors. Not enough to crash the program. If people started walking into walls when they saw a typo, going bonk, bonk, bonk—” Here her pantomime would have been more amusing and perhaps adorable if we had not been traveling at our current speed with her behind the wheel. “If people were having real problems with typos, I guess I’d understand better why I only get to see my bear for one week out of three whole months.”
Like a deftly coded function, Jane had returned the precise value of what troubled me. I was losing my grip on what the problem was, besides the fact that I had one. The media’s repetition of that why question had jostled any hope of certainty right out of my head. First I reassured Jane that my mission (an idea I’d come up with before even meeting her) could not ever measure up to time devoted exclusively to her. That accomplished, I stared out the window at sere grass and thought about prescriptivists, aka the Grammar Hawks, who loved to perpetuate the notion that English had a “pure” form. This monolithic set of rules about spelling and grammar, cemented in an ancient age, had supposedly remained unchallenged and unassailed until recent times, when ignorant barbarians besieged its gates with their poor spelling and lazy constructions. History shows this not to be the case.
First, it’s important to note that this complaint about the corruption of the English language is not new—it is very, very old. Perhaps the first professional Hawk was Giraldus Cambrensis (or, more familiarly, Gerald of Wales), a chronicler in the late twelfth century. In his Descriptio Cambriae (Description of Wales), he proclaimed the English spoken in the county of Devon as the purest form of the language, and lamented how the dastardly Danes and Norwegians were corrupting English dialects everywhere else. (Giraldus also had the distinction of being one of the first anti-Irish bigots on record.) A couple hundred years later, in the late fourteenth century, John of Trevisa made the same complaint—but this time the corrupting culprits were the Norman French. As the son of an Anglo-Norman baron, Giraldus would have disputed this. And the English language of, say, the early-to-mid-twentieth century—the version seen by current Hawks as the pure form to defend from today’s orthographic miscreants—would give both John and Giraldus the most terrible night sweats.
Who’s corrupting whom? Who is/was the guardian of the pure version, the right version of English? The situation gets very mucky when you consider the whole patchwork journey of the language. Old English, spoken for about seven hundred years by shepherds and reformed pillagers, was phonetic in its written form. You spelled the way you talked, and any kind of consistency—even on the same page—could go jump in the moat. Dictionaries weren’t even a glint in a scrivener’s eye. So much for stylistic uniformity, and the language’s ethnic purity had hardly maintained its chastity, either. Even at this early stage, outside influences poured in, not just from the Germanic tribes that had mashed the language together in the first place, but also Latin (from the remnants of the Roman Empire), and Viking marauders (the ones that Giraldus Cambrensis had complained so bitterly about). Then came the Norman invasion in 1066, and French began its long hold on English, shaping it into Middle English over the centuries. Only in the early 1400s do we see the beginnings of standardization, as legal and governmental clerks agreed upon a common written form (known as Chancery Standard) that kings and Parliament could use to address the whole nation. Even then, that was just the unified language of The Man; the lower classes of society preserved English, and the literate among them had neither cause nor desire to fix up their own spelling and grammar, which was still heavily regionalized.
It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that people cobbled together the first dictionaries, and those were aimed first at listing words as a reference, and then at defining all these new words flooding into English, plus of course the heaps of words that already existed. They hadn’t agreed upon the exact spelling of those words quite yet. That would take a whole other debate among the nation’s literate and influential that often turned rancorous. For the first time, the Grammar Hawks surfaced in real numbers, arguing that the language should be peeled back to its purest state—in this case arguing for the old Germanic form as the purest. Obviously they didn’t win out, but a later, similar wave backing Latin as the pure form would have better luck.
Only with the publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755, less than three hundred years ago, did the dictionary move from mere reference to being regarded as the central authority. As Seth Lerer points out in his book Inventing English, Johnson’s baby “created the public idea of the dictionary as the arbiter of language use.” Dr. Johnson had high hopes of being able to fix the language into a single solid and stable form. But the eight-year task of being the sole arbiter, navigating among regional variations and the abundance of spellings for difficult words, without a pole star (or more than the barest twinkling of phonetic principles) to guide his many decisions, eventually mellowed him from being a strict, self-made Hawk to taking on decidedly Grammar Hippie tendencies. Quotations from well-known sources littered the dictionary, backing up the choices he’d made, as if to direct attention away from his role as the decision-maker.* He ended up admitting in the preface that his purpose had become “not to form, but register the language; not to teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts” (quoted in Lerer’s book). That’s the Hawk-versus-Hippie dilemma crystallized.
The scenery rolled on. Jane yelped in delight and jabbed her finger at my window. “Look over there! Buffalo!”
I saw them, brown shaggy blots on a hill. “Yeah. Buffalo.” I slouched further in my seat, staring at the dashboard. Taped to it was a yellowed sign that Josh had bought for me in San Francisco, at a pirate supply store: IF DECK IS SALTY, THERE WILL BE LASHINGS. She saw me looking at it.
“You’re a salty bear right now, huh? Does that mean you’re lashing me to the roof for the rest of the trip? It’s okay. You know how I like fresh air.” When I didn’t laugh heartily enough, she knew I was still lashed to the mast of some stubborn mental frigate. “Aww, come on, I didn’t mean to say that your mission’s pointless. You’ve made a lot of people happy by fixing their signs. You have even more people cheering you on every day in the blog.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Good!” She brightened. “Hey, I should be making more corrections, right? I’ve only done a couple so far. When we’re in Billings, you tell me when you find one, and I’ll grab the Wite-Out. You point, I correct!”
“Deal,” I replied, though I wondered if I’d even bother pointing them out for correction. Battered by my own adventures in language investigation over the course of the last month and a half, I felt like weary Samuel Johnson, though with considerably less to show for my efforts. If English is ever-changing and ever-mutating, if no pure form exists and never existed in the first place, then what was I doing? I found that I’d never discovered a satisfactory answer and could no longer sail full speed ahead without one. I had set out to protect the language from errors born of both carelessness and ineducation, but now I didn’t quite understand the creature I had taken as my ward. It wriggled to get away from me, it twisted and eeled.
Perhaps, I thought, what I regarded as typos were not “mistakes” at all�
��they were part of the natural evolution of English. How could I know how the speakers of my native tongue would spell a hundred years from now? They’d alight from their potato-fueled urban gliders and laugh at my present efforts. “Check this out—back in 2008, there was a guy who wasted his time on apostrophes! Im sure glad we aint usin those anymore.” Was I standing in the way of an inevitable, continual, necessary transformation? I felt like I was trying to guard the tides from the moon. Grammar Hawks had erred in regarding English as a fixed, carefully sculpted entity—in other words, treating it like Latin.* An on-the-ground, vernacular language simply behaves in different ways from a rarefied and static tongue. Now I had to face the possibility that the mission of the Typo Eradication Advancement League was as outmoded as … well, Latin.
We finally trundled into Billings that evening. I got out of the car and stretched. Here I was on an epic road trip with my beautiful girlfriend. I had been behaving like a misguided Hawk for too long, swooping and darting at mice while the great grinding world moved on. Maybe it was time to do some strolling, enjoy a nice dinner with Jane, and see if I could spot a few typos here and there. Maybe it was time to roll like a Hippie.
When the Holiday Inn concierge handed me a map of the hotel, featuring a blaring typo in their near-nonsensical slogan (A FRONTIER OF IT’S OWN!), I barely even blinked. “How about that,” I said blandly to Jane, indicating the interloping apostrophe. “I’ll point it out to them later.” It was too late for much hunting, so we headed into a lively bar/meat market downtown and enjoyed great food and two-dollar local drafts, then retired to the hotel to play a rousing game of Phase 10. I drifted to sleep afterward with a sense of relief—I had learned to stop worrying and love the typos.
In the morning we returned to the downtown area, ready to track down errors now that businesses would be open. I saw by the light of day that Billings actually couldn’t boast all that much of a downtown, but there were a few shops and cafés available for our perusal. So we wandered, and soon enough I came across a typo, in a commemorative plate on display. It occurred in the middle of a paean to bears: “Be gentle enough to follow natures inspirations and be strong enough to make the world a better place.” To the left of the doggerel was a stoic and somewhat self-conscious ursine face.
“Look at that plate,” I said.
“What a bear, bear!” said Jane, clapping her hands. Even after she spotted the typo, her enthusiasm for a plate dedicated to her favorite animal could not be diminished. I thought, oh whatever, the manufacturer (American Expedition) won’t ever bother correcting this. I ought not to be a killjoy when the plate can still move bear enthusiasts like my TEAL companion.
Next we came upon a shop that carried, among other things, products by local artists. The proprietor came up to me with a warm smile and we exchanged pleasantries. As she chattered on, my eyes wandered to a display of framed poetry by Billings-area wordsmiths. There it was, buried in a poem about rural routes or something: “Our dusty road winds its’ way through sage …” Like Vancouver, Billings sure seemed to be having a problem with its itses. I opened my mouth to point out the typo to the nice lady in front of me … and I closed it again. I would say nothing. What tattered standard did I think to wave in the faces of the state’s honest citizens? I had only the grammatical snapshot of this mere moment in history to flaunt. The whole thing was pointless, as Jane had intimated. Thus spake, or didn’t spake, the newly minted Grammar Hippie. I snapped a quick picture of the poem and hurried out onto the street, Jane following me with a puzzled look.
“What happened?” she said outside.
I told her about the typo and my hesitation.
“I’m glad you didn’t say anything!” Jane asserted. “It’s a poem.”
“And?”
She squinted at me in the sunshine. “In poetry, language belongs to the poet. Would you go through e.e. cummings’s poems and add capitalization? Like Emily Dickinson’s old editor, removing all the dashes from her poems?”
Ouch. She had pierced right to the heart of the matter: I was presuming too much. The gentleman who’d come up with these verses was more poetaster than poet, but he still enjoyed citizenship in a country beyond the League’s jurisdiction. This had been obvious to Jane from the start. She was, now that I thought about it, the quintessential Grammar Hippie—not just due to her fondness for nonconfrontation, but because she recognized the mutable nature of truth. In my pre-League existence, if I complained to her about somebody knocking me over in a subway car, she would play devil’s advocate and suggest that the offender could have been having a bad day, or maybe he had bad eyesight. Jane understood that we are trapped within the cage of our own perceptions and biases. From my perspective, the subway brute existed only as a jerk: that moment of transgression defined him. But from his viewpoint, it was a passing instant in what might otherwise be a life of unblemished charity, hardly the action for which posterity should remember him. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible.
In language, as in life, we cling to what we were taught and what we have always done, making it difficult not just to understand the quirks and seeming peccadilloes of others, but to relinquish beliefs that have become outmoded. If I saw a sign that said ice tea instead of iced tea, I’d judge it as a mistake. But ice cream started off as iced cream. So many people left off the hard-to-enunciate d when spelling the word that it eventually disappeared. Whether I like it or not, ice tea might be vindicated someday by a shift in spelling norms. Why, then, should I sweat small distinctions that may eventually prove irrelevant? I had plenty of reasons to rejoice in our language. We speak, and write, in one of the most diverse, gloriously ecumenical tongues on the planet. In English, there is a word or phrase for pretty much anything we want to say, and if there isn’t, we make it up, and it is welcomed into the family. We can express ourselves as complexly or as simply as we like. We can be magniloquent didacts, or we can talk plain.
A pretty realization, so why did I feel empty?
Billings would be, in retrospect, a time of tranquillity. Soon after we left, Jane and I faced no end of traveler’s woes. Snow drifted down from the grayness, thickening gradually. By the time we crossed into Wyoming, we found ourselves cutting through a full-fledged storm. This was right around when Callie began to demand service for her engine, for the first time since the Southeast. We lost two and a half hours to car repairs in Sheridan, and all the while snow fell in sheets. We didn’t roll into Rapid City until almost nine o’clock at night. Here it was Authority’s turn to rebel, steering us amiss and leading us to a darkened mall instead of our hotel. Half-maddened by the worst drive of the trip and blinded by fogged windows, I swung Callie back around in a reckless turn. A police car materialized from the shadows, as if it had been waiting for someone like us to come along. The adolescent officer admonished me to “stop driving so crazy.” That I did not get a ticket was the sole mercy of the day. We finally reached the hotel, to discover that (a) it had a real live indoor waterslide and (b) the waterslide was now closed for the evening.
Still, we were able to simmer in a hot tub for a spell, and that helped. We went back to the room and drank a couple of nips, and I wrote the day’s blog entry while Jane embarked on a steamship for dreamland. I closed my laptop and glanced at the bed. She was sleeping with her mouth open, her arm curled around a little plush buffalo I’d bought for her. She’d come all the way out here, to drive across trackless plains and support a mission she didn’t believe in, only so that she could be with me. I already missed her. In a couple of days we would arrive in Minneapolis, and Jane would fly home, and I would be alone. The stretch of territory that remained after that, the final leg all the way back to Massachusetts, seemed vast and futile. If I had truly become a Grammar Hippie, an observer instead of a fixer, I no longer had much use for the aims of the League.
I could just speed home. I had a lot more stops on my itinerary in the Midwest and the East than were strictly necessary. I could lay aside my Kit and my hat
and dedicate myself to the enticing prospect of getting back to familiar environs as soon as possible. Then all these ambiguities and conundra would be over, and I could return to a normal life.
My cell phone rang.
“Check it,” said Benjamin. “There are two main categories of spelling junctions: plus-junctions and change-junctions. To plus morrow equals tomorrow, that’s a plus junction. Copy times ed equals copied, that’s a change junction. Your very first spelling catch—after the shower curtain, I mean—was ‘referal’. Refer times al equals referral, a consonant-doubling change-junction. They couldn’t handle the junction, man!”
I regarded the wall for a moment. A standard-issue hotel print hung there, flowers in a field that could have been anywhere. Finally I said, “Isn’t it about two in the morning on the East Coast?”
“Screw that, man. I can’t put this stuff down. I found some great books on grammar, and I’m beginning to understand how some of these typos keep happening.”
Jane muttered something about radio buttons and turned over in her sleep to dream further web-designer dreams. “That’s cool,” I said, “but—wait a minute, aren’t you supposed to be huddled in a tent in Georgia right now?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what we found during my leg of the trip, and I’ve been following the blog since then, and … I don’t think my part in this is over yet. Reading your entries from the last few days makes me all the more sure of that.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
Benjamin whooped into the phone. “You’re slipping off the track! It takes you five days to make ten corrections. From the numbers you just posted, you’ve dipped under fifty-one percent—you’re in danger of dropping below fifty percent corrected!”