A Typo a Day
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Portland, OR
Today Josh and I made a special effort at doing Portland, not only because it’s a cool city but also due to today being Josh’s birthday. Yes, Josh had the privilege of spending this particular anniversary of the day he was brought into the world with a sluggish, unshorn typo-hunter. Fortunately, Portland stepped up and provided a suitable dose of joy for my friend, beginning with an excellent breakfast at a place called Jam on Hawthorne. We had exquisite pancakes and French toast and eggs, and the waitress was quite cordial. I did notice a typo on the great board that o’erhung the dining area.
Ah, the perpetually troublesome nature of double-consonant words! I thought there’d be no harm in alerting the waitress to the error. She nodded, her expression carefully blank, and professed to despising typos herself, but would not correct this one on the spot or let me do so, as it would require fetching a ladder. I gave her a TEAL card. I hope that the typo was fixed, though Josh had his doubts that such an ephemeral piece of text as today’s soup listing would be revised. At least I can take comfort from the fact that the word must now be gone altogether, replaced by minestrone or somesuch. Still, I have a secret fear that typos not properly slain will someday rise from their plots, with a terrible hunger that cannot be slaked.
After breakfast, we stopped by a local produce market across the street. Josh thought it’d be a good idea to pick up some citrus providers to stave off scurvy for yet another day. I wandered among the apples, and lo, my scouring of the area proved fruitful:
I brought the typo to the attention of the woman running the place, and she thought it was funny. She allowed me to fix the mistake (which was on both sides of the sign), having seen the wide variety of tools at my disposal in the Typo Correction Kit, which I carry everywhere with me, even to subcommittee meetings and cricket matches. First, however, she asked, a bit plaintively, “It won’t look obvious, will it?”
Non, madame. I gave you my word that I would apply the utmost care to the correction. It’s only when I am forced to be furtive that sloppiness results.
All right, as it turned out, some furtiveness resulted in that market after all. In the midst of wiping out that errant a, I noticed a typo on another sign:
She had been so kind. I would hate to make a real nuisance of myself. Mightn’t I just correct this one too while I’m at it, and while Josh is so conveniently distracting the woman with heartfelt questions about leeks?
Delicious.
Josh and I headed into the popular Pearl District of Portland, where I wanted to check out the legendary Powell’s, also known as the City of Books. That was one metropolis I would not mind living in, not at all. I headed for my usual haunt, the fantasy and sci-fi section, because (as if this has not already been established through the nature of TEAL’s quest) I am a monstrous geek. And, oh, the testimonials and the cross-references! The outlining of authors’ corpora! I had stepped into a sympathetic universe, and I was loath to leave. I did do my part to keep that section pristine, for I noticed a small but impassable typo on one dangling label:
I know that I would hate to have a piece of paper below my works spotlighting me as, say, Jeff Dec, so I took the liberty of adding in the extra letter. Only later did I realize that there was another mistake in the sign. I’m sure you can spot it.
On a landing near the elevators, they had Powell’s swag for sale. One t-shirt design I liked above all the others, but I had a problem with it. Why, when all the other designs were correct, did this one refuse to include an apostrophe?
I’m sure this was not a typo so much as a choice made by some green-haired designer who isn’t afraid to break the rules. Still, I asked the nearest Powell’s employee about it. Why did he think the apostrophe had been left out?
He just stared at me, then said in a somewhat dull tone, “I couldn’t tell you.”
Come on, I thought, I call for speculation, my good man. “Could the apostrophe have migrated, somehow? Do you think it’s behind that raincloud?”
He laughed at this and offered some jocular response, but he was also making a conscious effort to get into the elevator and put a metal door between us. I resigned myself to getting that t-shirt and perhaps marking it after the first wash. Before I left that area, though, I found something in true need of correction:
I found a clerk and reported it to her, and with much sympathetic clucking over the mistake, she phoned those who could be responsible for fixing the sign. Then she reported to me that it’d be taken care of very soon. I feel that there’s a seventy-percent chance that this will actually occur. Powell’s surely does not trade in empty promises.
We passed a sign with items rendered in chalk. It was not a good day for things written in that dusty medium.
We walked around for a while longer, chatting with a garrulous old man at the visitors’ center and then stopping in for free cupcakes at a place run by Julie’s friend. Then we headed up a hill in a sky tram to get a better view of the city. Since the day was clouded over and we couldn’t see Mt. Hood, we felt underwhelmed by our detour. But it was still cool riding the tram, a little.
In the early evening, we were scheduled to catch a drink with David, a reader of this humble blog and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of English spelling. We arrived in his neighborhood, but as we were walking to the meeting spot, I noticed a quote by Jonathan Swift in the window of a nearby restaurant, one that did not seem right to me. We figured that it was wrong and corrected it, leaving our card, but I believe now that it was right after all. We consulted some erroneous sources at the time. Our apologies. Fortunately, the correction was not permanent.
Totals
Typos Found: 191
Typos Corrected: 115
