The Great Typo Hunt: Changing the World One Correction at a Time. Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2010. 288 pp.
Any professor, writer, schoolmarm, or even semi-literate reader can empathize with Jeff Deck, a young, single editor stalled in his career who saw one too many prominent typos and went berserk.
We’ve all been there. The rustic carved wooden sign announcing “The Johnson’s” house. The grocery checkout for “15 items or less.” The eternal pain of the dear departed spinning in their graves at the “Oak Lawn Cemetary.” These are cries of pain for Deck and his green-eyeshade partner, Benjamin D. Herson.
The Great Typo Hunt is no weighty work of research, but it surely is a sign of the times (a sign that, as a cover blurb points out, is too often missing an apostrophe). The misuse and abuse of the language became so unbearable that these two typo hunters were projected on a cross-country orgy of copy editing in public.
Deck and Herson were writers on the fringes of the publishing world—Deck as an associate editor for some special interest magazines in Washington, D.C., and Herson a bookseller. Their credentials as public editors were thin—both had published short stories, and Deck won two junior high school spelling bees—but their typo sensitivity was set high; typos leapt out at them everywhere—“bread puding” on a restaurant chalk board, “hungy Please help” on a homeless man’s cardboard sign, “mens contemporary suits” at Filene’s department store, “Quarter’s Slots” and “carmel corn” in Las Vegas neon.
The quest to change the world, one typo at a time, started when Deck suddenly registered on a sign near his apartment that he’d walked past scores of times: “Private Property No Tresspassing,” on a fence around a vacant lot.
Deck wrote,
Sure, I’d noticed this sign before . . . . This time, though, the sign’s offense struck deeper. How many spelling mistakes had I noticed over the years in shop windows, street signs, menus, billboards and other public venues? Not an enterance. NYC Pasta and Pizza at it’s best! . . . There was the answer—typo hunting was the good that I, Jeff Deck, was uniquely suited to visit upon society.
Deck recruited Herson and some support troops, created the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL), and set off on a ten-week trans-American road trip, armed with a variety of Sharpies, Wite-Out, and other typo-correction gear.
Before they were finished, they had traveled the country east to west and north to south, documenting 437 public typos and editing 236 of them. One of these was on what prosecutors later called “a priceless historic artifact,” a 1932 hand-painted sign at the Grand Canyon that landed them in federal court in United States of America v. Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson. The court documents were frightening, but the effect was marred by all governmental typos.
Their wanton editing on U.S. Park Service property cost them a trip back to Flagstaff, AZ, attorney fees and court costs, a guilty plea to federal conspiracy charges, and a $3,000 fine. (“When it comes to marking up historic signs,” the Associated Press reported, “good grammar is a bad defense.” Deck and Herson dispute the Arizona Republic’s report describing them as “two self-anointed ‘grammar vigilantes,’” saying they had never described—or anointed—themselves as vigilantes.)
It’s difficult not to admire the Quixotic nature of the TEAL experiment. Their book is an easy read, kind of a copyeditor’s version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Lite. Aside from their roadtrip stories, The Great Typo Hunt ends with renewed commitment to a literacy effort on the next TEAL trip, and reveals questions about U.S. sociology, race, education, and the power of language. The book also concludes with an intriguing bibliography on language and a brief “Field Guide to Typo Avoidance.”
Many in this age of the 140-character Tweet and vowel-free texting decry the end of literacy, but in truth language started deteriorating almost as soon as there was language to misuse, misspell, and mispunctuate. Writer William Zinsser once observed about English that, “Probably no other language has such a vast supply of verbs so bright with color,” but the poet George Eliot thought in the 1800s that rules had ruined the language: “Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays,” she said.
H.L. Mencken, that journalistic curmudgeon, agreed, arguing that rules get in the way of true expression. “Correct spelling,” he said, “is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”
But the men from TEAL would disagree. “[T]ypos are a symptom of a larger problem,” Herson says. “Taken as a whole, they can point to widespread misunderstanding about spelling and grammar, not to mention lagging education in language.”
To which Deck adds, “Typos mess with the most important aspect of written communication: clarity. . . . Language is bound up in every part of our lives. So when it goes awry, that indicates more than just a spelling and grammar problem.
“No typo exists in a vacuum,” he says. “Behind every misplaced comma or junction error is a story—whether it be about education, carelessness, or socioeconomic and privilege.”
EDWARD C. PEASE
Utah State University