The Great Typo Hunt

August 16, 2010
Deck is a man on a mission. From greasy spoon menus to national park signs, he and his cohorts (including co-author Herson) road trip around the nation looking for, and attempting to correct, spelling mistakes, misplaced apostrophes, and other small but apparently significant abuses to the English language. While Deck and friends approach their trip with a good sense of humor, early chapters feel prosaic. Before departing Deck contemplates the "madness" of the endeavor. Is correct commas from a car really all that wild? And surely we could have done without the litany of bear-related pet names Deck's girlfriend often employs when addressing him. Given that most readers drawn to this book will already share the authors' penchant for consistent and "proper" language, more substantial exploration of their evolving motivation would have been stimulating. Deck and Herson speed past questions of race, class, dialect, and education that their quest inherently raises. While the moments of human interaction run from tender to hostile, the end result doesn't add up to more than the sum of its anecdotes. Though the many snapshots included (often in the "before and after" vein, showing the fruits of their labor) add welcome humor.

May 15, 2010
Magazine editor Deck and bookseller Herson conduct a three-month exercise in field orthography.

As an editor, Deck is a foe of typos, but he is no simple grammar cop, smacking his superior lips over misspellings and errors in punctuation. They are careless, for sure, but typos signal a greater problem, he writes—miscommunication. To combat the problem, he formed the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) and took his editorial zeal on the road around the United States, mostly in the company of his friend Herson and often sporting a mock-Shakespearean tone:"O Weird Sisters, O Fates, you had stricken me with a typo in the very store where I'd purchased my white-out!" During their journey, they found typos and tried to correct them, and they employed stealth on occasion, though asking permission was more in keeping with the mission—to call attention to the mistakes without slapping wrists. This would be pretty thin gruel for a 300-page narrative, but Deck takes what might have been a stunt and uses it to explore some of the thornier areas of communication, class and capitalism. When retail clerks hesitated to comply with his request to fix a typo, he eventually came to appreciate their predicament:"Making a decision could only offer repercussions for the wrong choice, and no reward for the right one." Tiptoeing through the politically correct minefield of language as it reflects race and class, the authors acknowledge that fear of using the wrong language has trumped what we say with how we say it. When their project garnered news coverage that got it wrong, Deck and Herson wondered about the veracity of all news. Though they provide no earthshaking realizations, the authors succeeded in instigating"furious conversations among all the various factions and individuals who still cared about spelling and grammar, and…reveal[ing] telling patterns about the mistakes people were making."

A testament to the fact that typos matter, especially when you look behind them.

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