Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 13, 2010
I Swear ...
Seen any good typos lately?
Vic Fleming
I haven’t read “The Great Typo Hunt” by Jeff Deck yet.
(But I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last week on Monday. in Williamsburg.)
I will read “The Great Typo Hunt” soon, though. At least I think I will.
Jeff’s book is subtitled “Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time.”
Jeff and a cohort, Benjamin D. Herson, formed the “Typo Eradication Advancement League” and took a 10-week trip around the perimeter of the country, with Sharpies, Wite-Out, dry erase markers, chalk and crayons in hand.
They looked for mistakes on signs, menus, etc. They found 437 on their journey. Whenever possible, they sought permission to correct the errors.
Jeff reported that they did, in fact, correct about half of what they found. He blogged about the experience and then sold the book to Random House.
I bet that he and Ben had a lot of fun.
On August 9, I heard Jeff Deck, on NPR being interviewed by Tony Cox of “Talk of the Nation.” Tony clearly wanted the interview to be funny. He laughed a lot. But his laughter seemed strained.
The interview was not funny. It had an imbalance about it.
The interviewee seemed to want to think through his answers, leading to silence that the interviewer could or would not deal with.
“Apostrophe mistakes were the most common,” the author said pensively, citing as an example a sign somewhere in Idaho that read “Rest Room’s.”
Tony read several emails from listeners.
One of those contributed a story about someone who used the word “copulation” instead of “compilation” in a master’s thesis.
Another wrote of an ad that she had seen for a “24-Hour Toe Service.”
Yet another wrote about an ad for “braed,” worrying that this might cause her child to develop a Southern drawl.
I suppose I should have emailed the story about the letter in which the word “premises” got spelled “penises.”
I read the excerpt of the book printed at NPR’s Web site. Early in the excerpt, Jeff mentions a “Pasta at It’s Best” sign, as well as one that promoted “Palm Reading’s.”
Excerpt from the book:
“To/too, their/there/they’re, and your/ you’re confusion, comma and apostrophe abuse, transpositions and omissions, and other sins against intelligibility too heinous to dwell on. Each one on its own amounted to naught but a needle of irritation thrusting into my tender hide. But together they constituted a larger problem, a social ill that cried out for justice. “For a champion, even.”
I can identify.
Regrettably, though, long lists of errata just do not hold my attention anymore. If they ever did. They really do not, as a whole, comprise a humorous bit of work. There is no incongruity, for so much if it is all too predictable,
And Jeff surely learned this on his quest. For his book, if the excerpt is representative, is more about the experience than it is about the substance of the clerical errors he came upon.
The truth is, and I‘ve become convinced that the truth always has been, that a lot of people who are in the positions of posting language in public (a) make mistakes, (b) show their ignorance (by not knowing that they’ve made a mistake) and/or (c) don’t care to discuss the issue of whether there are mistakes in what they’ve posted.
And that’s lief!
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
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