by Jeff Deck
“So let’s figure out what TEAL is really about,” I said, “and that will naturally be the middle path.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Benjamin replied. “I have trouble admitting it, but this typo hunt is a blast.”
“Thanks.”
“Though it’s not the typos themselves I care about,” Benjamin said. “For me, it’s mostly about—” A barking ball of stir-crazed energy drowned out the rest. We found ourselves in the furniture-chewed apartment of our Bloomington host.
“Uh, I didn’t quite catch that,” I said.
Benjamin shook his head. “Forget it. Wasn’t important.”
Even so, I hated when that happened. Which got me thinking. “Everyone deserves to be understood,” I declared.
“What’s that?”
“What TEAL’s really about.”
He looked like he’d just downed one of the apocryphal eight spiders annually consumed by the average person. “First, didn’t we agree that typos rarely have an impact on clarity?” Before I could respond, he added, “More important, I disagree with the basic proposition. We have freedom of speech in this country, but that doesn’t extend to a freedom to be understood. Adults are responsible for putting in whatever effort is necessary to communicate. Not everyone does that; therefore, not everyone deserves to be understood. Maybe I’m right not to trust the meat from a store that can’t get the spelling of grocery right, so they get less business due to a lack of professionalism. Sometimes you get what you deserve.”
That sounded shockingly Hawkish for Benjamin. It came back to judgment. We’d been worried about the Atlanta typo on the Obama shirt, fearing that not merely the wearer, but our candidate himself, would be judged by that missing apostrophe.
My eyes strained at their nerve tethers, nearly jumping out of the sockets in pursuit of something I’d glimpsed while driving past. Benjamin hadn’t seen it. I doubled back and pulled Callie to a stop in front of the billboard. RESTUARANT!
“I’ve got it!” I declared as we ambled into the field. The billboard wasn’t up on a scaffold, but the error was still sufficiently elevated to make this a difficult correction. “I was close before.” We craned our necks up at the transposition. “People judge you by your mistakes, so we can help people avoid the scorn and judgment of others. If they don’t want the typos fixed … I guess they’re comfortable being judged.” Ugh, now I sounded overly Hawkish.
There was no way to fix this artfully. The best we’d be able to do was add little editorial arrows above and below to show where the letters should go. After a test leap proved inadequate, my lighter colleague placed himself immediately underneath the troubled letters. “Give me a leg up?” Clutching the marker in his teeth and walking his way up the sign with his hands, Benjamin let me hoist him up as high as we could send him, but even then he could only reach high enough for the bottom arrow. He got back down and I flexed my weary fingers.
“Afraid not,” Benjamin said as we marched back to Callie. “Keep working. I have a problem with your hypothetical judgmental people. You, Jeff, are the one who cares! Referring to some other person who might come by and make judgments sounds too much like … like what you hear on TV. ‘Some people think that Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright is very telling.’ No, they don’t; the TV pundit wants to justify covering an attention-getting, ratings-boosting non-story. These hypothetical—these fictional—people give that pundit latitude to push his issues on us, or blatantly replace news with entertainment. You can’t slip into the comfort of doing the same, man. We correct typos because someone else might be bothered by them? It’s too circular, and you’re better than that.”
“Right. I’m getting closer, though. Give me a moment to rejigger my thoughts and try again.” We arrived at the home of my mentor from the Rocks & Minerals days, Marie. An editor herself, she dove right into the typo hunting while expertly tour-guiding us around Cincinnati.
Waiting for us to resume verbal fisticuffs, Benjamin wandered past something in the gift shop of the Krohn Conservatory. After pulling a double take, he read a note out loud: “The wood chopsticks stamped with an eternity design and are nestled in a double fish brocade pouch.” After a quick discussion over the best way to correct this, Benjamin added an arrow to indicate where the “are” should be moved to. “There, now future readers won’t get dizzy puzzling that one out.” He smiled.
Then I smiled. “It’s rude not to proofread.”
“You’re onto something, Mr. Deck, but be careful there.” As the eminent linguist David Crystal has pointed out, grammar and etiquette have long been tied together. The post-dictionary craze about proper grammar went hand in hand with an increasing obsession over proper rules for everyday interaction in polite society. Start with the fork the farthest out and work your way in; a gentleman walks on the right side of his lady. While some of these rules are merely anachronistic with a faint trace of logic in their origins, many simply popped into existence as the demand for such rules increased. The self-perpetuating emphasis on the “proper” way to handle all manner of minutiae demanded more rules, so more rules there would be. I could understand why people might throw up their hands at all the little grammar rules that feel much like table-setting details—which one of these is the salad fork, and why does the number indicating the footnote go after the comma?
While I might bend toward the Hawks here, I don’t want to twirl a baton in their parade. Lynne Truss manned a float in this parade when, succeeding her angry-panda grammar rant, she wrote Talk to the Hand, an intolerant little etiquette manual that bemoans the state of society today. What is the world coming to? Even as I felt repelled by the idea of becoming a maven of grammatical etiquette, the point remained that a certain inattention was rude, or worse. The Cartoon Art Museum had evidenced a disdain for its paying customers, tossing up signs that became utter nonsense in places; they couldn’t be bothered to check them over.
As Marie led us onto the Purple People Bridge, which crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky, Benjamin mentioned to her how much he’d enjoyed tormenting me over the past few days. “He tries to figure it all out, and I kick back and act profound by saying, ‘Um, not quite.’”
“All right, sensei,” I said. “What’s wrong with ‘It’s rude not to proofread’?”
“Nothing and everything. It’s all a matter of emphasis, grasshopper.”
In the mall on the Kentucky shore, a plural PHOTO’S sat on a light blue background painted with traces of white representing clouds. I tried to use the elixir of correction to cloud over the apostrophe, but it was too blatant that way, with the two shades of white not quite matching. Instead, I made a white elixir bird to fly up there in the sky with the clouds. I hope they liked it. Our Kentucky typo corrected, we left the shopping center and turned right back around.
“It’s rude not to proofread,” I said. “No. It’s rude not to proofread. Why don’t people proofread?” The author who doesn’t proofread may leave trouble behind for his readers. They’re now forced into exerting the extra effort to decipher what the author had meant. Then again, many readers won’t bother. Benjamin was right that the author didn’t automatically deserve to be understood. What readers deserve, though, is that the author present his message with the greatest possible clarity.
The shifting weather mirrored my inner exultation, as the wind picked up and the waves below the bridge chopped and frothed. We paused, occupying neither Ohio nor Kentucky, but some strange liminal zone.
“You’re an editor, Jeff.”
“I’m an editor.”
“As am I,” Marie chimed in.
“Yes! We’re editors! By the plow of Cincinnatus, we’re editors!” I shouted on the bridge, my words dispersed but not dispelled by the rising winds.
Our mission wasn’t about the mere typos, those little errors. Our message surpassed typos on its way to the greater realm of clarity. At some point an English teacher got through to me that I shouldn’t just write a paper and tu
rn it in, that I should take the time to edit it. Maybe even edit it again. The first draft of writing was only about getting it down from your head and onto the page. The editing stage was where you made it work: refined what you were trying to say, figured out how to say it better, and polished it to maximum effect. In fixating on the niggling little rules, the Hawks were reading only sentences and not paragraphs, pages, or books.
Back at college, Benjamin had reorganized the whole first chapter of his thesis, cutting it up into pieces and shuffling them around on his floor, until he’d gotten all his information into a logical flow that helped his argument. My thesis adviser had sent me back through every chapter I wrote to cut the excess fat, redundant sentences and words that didn’t add anything new.
I didn’t want to stop at raising awareness of typos. They were the obvious mistakes. I wanted to help everyone attain new levels of clarity, to recognize the editing process as a part of writing. “TEAL’s mission should be about raising editing awareness.”
“And hopefully without being jive-ass arrogant punks about it,” Benjamin added.
“Without rancor,” I agreed. Yes, we could offer a new voice of grammatical reason, a voice that wasn’t screaming or jeering.
I stopped short. “What about the typos then? Do we leave that all behind?”
“No,” Benjamin said. “Dude, the typos have led us into so many other things we’d never thought of … that’s what I got stuck on, why I had to come back. If I get a vote, it’s that we keep riding on this course. See what we find. I’m curious about what happens next.”
I tugged at my cowboy hat. “Yeah, me too,” I said. We’d come to a kind of koan: the path you’re on is the path you need to find. “Let’s go blog our finds. If my count’s correct, we’ve got eight for nine today, and I think that might push us back over fifty percent.” Benjamin and I stepped onto Ohio soil once more, ready for whatever revelations awaited us. We wouldn’t drop below fifty percent again.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 328
Total corrected: 165
15 | Why Hudson Can’t Read
May 2–6, 2008 (Athens, OH, to Cleveland, OH)
Here, an Ironic tragedy brings our Heroes to a juddering halt, as wounded and wailing as foundering school Standards. The torch of Education burns low in a toy store with auspices of a loftier, educational purpose.
During a car-bound lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and graham crackers, Benjamin discovered a surprise on his voice mail. We’d parked on a residential street near Ohio University, killing time before meeting up with my sister. As he listened, a strange expression stole over his face. He hit the replay button so that I could hear the message his friend from the bookstore had left. “Hey man, this is Semajh. Uh … I don’t know if you’ve been peein’ on bushes or what, yo, but the Park Service is really wanting to talk to you. They called here looking for you. I told ’em you don’t work here anymore, but I don’t know, man. It was weird.”
We debated the merits of trying to call the Service, but we decided that the odds of finding the person who’d been looking for us, when we didn’t know his or her name or what it had been concerning, would be pretty slim. We probably should have tried anyway. Benjamin tried to call his old co-worker back, but he wasn’t around, so Benjamin left a quick message. After speculating about what interest the National Park Service could possibly have in talking to Benjamin, we honestly forgot about it for a while and headed off to typo-hunt.
The following morning, we journeyed up to the pleasant suburban town of Hudson, where my father and stepmother live. I’d planned to spend several days with them, since I passed through northeastern Ohio infrequently and I had some filial duties to catch up on. Though Benjamin and I enjoyed the respite, the town would yield one of the strangest and most appalling interactions of the entire trip. I had rarely spent much time in any one place, and a week in Hudson could have been pushing it. Realizing our proximity to Cleveland, Benjamin played nothing but Bone thugs-n-harmony during our outings, and that also made our stay seem longer. Even with plans to spend our last couple days visiting Cleveland proper and my other sister’s college, Kent State, we were scraping the barrel for fertile typo ground by our last leisurely Hudson hunting day, despite Dad’s best efforts at searching out new venues in the area. Fortunately, we’d saved a patch of the town square, and here we went into every single store, finding little in typo quantity, but much in sinister quality.
My first impression of the Miracle on Main Street shop was appreciative: a weird amalgam of office/school supplies and toys that weren’t mindless junk to clutter kids’ rooms. This place had a laudably educational orientation, with products ranging from the learning is fun! extreme back to the more natural give kids something more interesting to do than watch TV. Craft kits adorned the walls, and a spinner rack featured an abundance of energetic play aids, including jump ropes and hula hoops. Alas, before I could picture a pastoral landscape filled with sickeningly bubbly children leading delight-heavy existences under a friendly sun, that destroyer of dreams interfered once again. I gawked at the sign upon finding it. YEAR AROUND FUN! PLAY IN DOORS & OUT!
Hm. Playtime in America might have been a wee bit … outsourced. While the policy of the League involved not picking on speakers of English as a second language, this was different. The sign had likely originated somewhere else, but it had landed in northeast Ohio, and here in an education-oriented store of all places, it was perfectly fair to address the idiom trouble that the makers of this sign had run into. I went for a clerk. Benjamin and I were the only ones in here at the moment, so I didn’t have to be shy about stealing time away from an actual customer.
When I pointed out the sign’s strange claim of “year around fun,” the clerk replied, “It just means that you can enjoy this in spring, summer, winter, or fall.” She didn’t sound like she was making fun of us, but I didn’t know what to say next.
At my silence, Benjamin stepped in, presuming that she hadn’t known what I was talking about and so, not knowing how to respond, had offered a ridiculously obvious clarification. He saw her bet: “See, the uh, problem is that it says year around fun instead of year-round, which is the usual expression.”
“Oh,” she said, looking over. “Well, I believe they’re making a pun.”
Okay. Jump ropes, hula hoops. Year around fun. Right, ha ha. I might have accepted this defense of her sign if it hadn’t had another quirk: PLAY IN DOORS & OUT. I let her pun theory pass with a quick dubious glance and switched to the other offender. “Okay, but check this out. ‘Play in … doors’? It should be ‘play indoors.’” I spoke too confidently, certain she’d have no objection here. The absurd images conjured by the typo would do my work for me, I mistakenly assumed. Talking about it later, we realized that even the two of us had interpreted it differently. Benjamin had pictured someone attempting to work a hula hoop or skip rope within the confines of a door frame. I pictured something even more literal: playing in the doors like you’d play in the playground, which is to say within it, like termites. Mom! My hula-hoop matter-phasing shut off, and I’m stuck inside the door again! To my dismay, the hula-hooping child wasn’t the only thing out of phase.
“No, I think that’s right,” the woman replied, yielding to the sign all judgment and authority. Someone had printed it and released it to the four winds, so by God, it must be right. Who were we, mere individuals, to question the will of the toy manufacturers?
“That’s definitely wrong,” I replied. Should I go into why? Should we talk about clarity of meaning? Now who would be explaining the—I’d believed—obvious?
Then she made a move that could very well have spun my opinion of her right around. She reached for a true authority to consult, a handy dictionary. I sighed in relief, ready to christen her as redeemed while she flipped to the letter i. That was the value of a store emphasizing education. In the end, education isn’t about how many facts you can cram into your head, it’s about kn
owing how to get the information you need. Even Conan Doyle’s polymathic detective kept encyclopedias and atlases close at hand for quick reference.*
Consider my shock when, in a vindicated tone, she declared herself right and put the dictionary nearly in my face with a smug “Look!”
We looked.
In and doors were separated by a dot. Many of the other words on that page, and the rest of the pages in the dictionary, had words broken up with dots. Though he looked somewhat peaked, Benjamin graciously accepted the weighty and irksome charge that now fell to us. “Um,” he said. “That’s a dot that separates the syllables of a word. That doesn’t mean it’s two words.”
Silence. All the hidden host of the grammatical divine awaited her verdict. She gave Benjamin a look like he was trying to trick her, so I added, “Look at the other words. They have dots between their syllables, too.” Oh, I’d been right about my opinion of her spinning around when she reached for that dictionary. Unfortunately, it had spun a full three-sixty. I would like to applaud her decision to bring the dictionary in as the decider, but at least a passing familiarity with how a dictionary works would be helpful. The worst part, and we couldn’t have known this at the time, was that she wouldn’t be the last person we’d encounter who’d been smart enough to reach for a dictionary but then failed to be informed by it.* The bitter irony of being in this educational store with an employee who’d never been properly introduced to the dictionary was not lost on me.
“Oh, all right,” she said finally, “but that still doesn’t mean this is wrong.” She gestured toward the sign.
Time to roll out the rusty old gimmick. “We’re going around the country correcting typos,” I began, and asked if perchance we could …
“No.” Emphatic, like scolding a toddler with an uncapped permanent marker who was heading for pristine walls.
I couldn’t let this one go. I just couldn’t, and I used the reason I couldn’t let it go as my next argument. “We were thinking that since this store has an educational bent, you’d appreciate knowing about these typos, and that we could help out by fixing them.”