Typo Hunt Across America

Followers of the League have been able to find typos on their own pretty easily, but so far many of them seem to be having trouble with actually getting the typos fixed. The obstacles, as I see them, break down into two categories: 1) Physical, such as plastic or glass shielding the sign in which the typo occurs, or the typo being above or beyond one’s reach; and 2) Psychological, manifesting in either a fear of confronting the typo’s owner or a queasiness about whether such an action would in fact be justified. I cannot address the first category, as TEAL frowns upon corrective acts that endanger property value or personal well-being (or both), so I’ll take a moment to examine the second. There arises a whole stable of troubling questions when one considers whether to let someone know about a typo in or about their place of business; have you found that you’re asking yourself any of the following?

Will this guy kill me if I tell him that he spelled “potatoes” wrong? No, he is not allowed to under federal law. He may give you a dirty look. He may make an unsubtle effort to get you to leave the store. But chances are you will remain free from bodily harm. Just assess the neighborhood and the setting carefully first. Much like hiking or lake-swimming, typo-hunting is best enjoyed under the buddy system.

Is this an establishment run by those speaking English as their second language? If the typos are heaped upon one another in an obvious fashion, that’s a good clue. Sometimes you don’t realize it until you’re halfway through an awkward encounter with the proprietor. When in doubt, give the folks a pass– you can find plenty of other stuff around the neighborhood in need of fixing. Remember, you’d probably sound pretty clumsy in their home tongue.

Am I going to be bothering that cashier? Some store or restaurant (or whatever) employees are pretty busy all the time, so there’s a chance that they won’t slow down just to let you insert an apostrophe into one of their signs. You never know, though, until you ask. You might be surprised at who expresses gratitude at being able to improve the public presentation of their business.

Could I get in trouble if I fixed the mistake on my own? If you’re smart about it, you’ll be okay. Again, having a buddy along is helpful, for running interference or keeping watch while you work. Make it look as pretty/consistent as you can. You should only really correct something without asking if there’s no one around to ask or you can predict that the response would be tepid. I would recommend staying away from state- or federal-owned property, though… trust me on this one.  Yes, you could.  Very much so.  Don’t do it!

Who am I to point out somebody else’s mistake? You’re a person just trying to be helpful, that’s who. The store or other organization has put the sign out for the public to see. That means it is fair game. As long as you’re courteous and maybe a little self-effacing when you mention the typo and ask if you can fix it, nobody can rightfully accuse you of being a dick. This is not the same as ragging on someone’s spelling in an e-mail or pronunciation of a word in conversation; this is making an attempt to improve a piece of public communication.

How do I even bring the typo up? It’s best to jump right into the matter after greetings have been exchanged. You don’t want to lead the employees into thinking that you’re actually going to buy into the service they’re offering, lest they be disappointed when you bring up your true purpose. Feel free to mention the League if you think it’ll help; they might have even heard of it. Just be nice and lean on the fact that you are trying to help out (and that everybody makes mistakes).

That’s all I’ve got for now. Courage, dear Leaguers.

With a distinct absence of fanfare, here’s your latest TEAL coverage:

NY Times

New Hampshire Public Radio

Buffalo News

That last, by the way, is not a periodical of current events exclusively pertaining to buffaloes. Were such a publication to exist, though, the little buffalo that I got Jane in a shop by the Continental Divide would finally have something to read about his people. Buffaloie did enjoy a glimpse of his brethren as we passed them in Montana, though.

I figured I’d take a moment or two for tonight’s entry to enumerate what the League does not consider to be typos. Since no TEAL Manual of Style exists (yet, anyway), some followers of the League’s exploits might get the impression that our fixes were carried out in a somewhat arbitrary manner. I admit that I am a man of mercurial and occasionally conflicting impulses, with a thoroughly subjective eye toward defining grammatical sins and misdemeanors. My overall philosophy, however, is pretty straightforward: we should be clear, and we should be consistent. Everything else is just pedantry, no? So what is not a typo?

Comma underuse or overuse. Those outraged by the abuse of apostrophes might naturally turn toward the defense of their low-hanging cousins, as well. Keep in mind, though, that commas (or their omission) allow a writer to control the pace and feel of a sentence as few other things can. If a writer wants to talk about “a cold grey night,” should we really compel her to stick a comma between the two adjectives? Her meaning is clear without it. I will sometimes put a comma in to separate two verbs using me as the subject, but won’t use a second “I” after the comma. (E.g., the previous sentence.) Technically this violates certain ancient taboos. I am enjoying the privilege of my comma, but I’m not paying the price. Does it really matter?

Variations from one’s own Style Manual. You may have memorized the Chicago Style rule that lists must contain a comma before the “and” (e.g., “I purchased rifles, bandoliers, and grenades at the military surplus store”), but that doesn’t mean that a sentence by someone operating under AP Style (”… rifles, bandoliers and grenades …”) is wrong. Even if you’ve always used the AP Style fashion for s-ending possessives (Indiana Jones’ stubble) in your own writing, you still can’t declare that somebody going by Chicago (Indiana Jones’s stubble) is incorrect. Often the problem with this one is that many people are unaware that more than one accepted approach exists. They would be surprised indeed at the subtle wars that are waged among the adherents of the various manuals. Certainly each manual has its own usefulness within the medium it seeks to govern; the rules of a specialized academic journal will be different than that of a general-circulation newspaper because their priorities are dissimilar. But no one manual can lay claim to, say, a random sign in a storefront window.

Slip-ups in speech. Many readers, giddy from the enchantment of the corrections that we made on signs around the country, asked us to do the same for the way that people talk. The League dreads the thought of attempting to police the speech of human beings, both for practical reasons and the sinister import of such a task. I trip over my tongue just as much as, if not more than, other folks. My stutterings, mumblings, and malapropisms disappear into the aether soon after I’ve spoken them. A gaffe that I have written into a sign, however, will remain visible to the world as long as the sign is up. Which could be a very long time.

Sentence fragments. Sometimes a writer will throw in a sentence fragment for dramatic effect. Or for various other reasons! As long as the meaning in the paragraph remains clear, I think it’s silly to ban fragments just because they’re unorthodox. They can be quite efficacious. And a little bit sexy, too.

Tune in next time; I’m sure there’s plenty to argue about here for now.

I suppose after this week is over, I’ll have to figure out some means of income, as June’s rent looms and I sort through the many bills that arrived at my apartment in my absence. I did deposit a thirty-six-dollar check today that was pure T-shirt profit. Thanks, friends of the League. I think it’s high time that I order my own TEAL shirt!

Benjamin crunched our final ratio. We ended up with 54.61% of the total typos found being corrected. This may improve slightly over time if we can go after the corporate-level villainies that were being perpetuated in some signs.  And also if loyal readers can check up on the dozens of shopkeepers who claimed that they’d be replacing their signs in a couple weeks anyway.  I’m sure at least one or two of them were telling the truth.

We took a walk around Somerville this evening. Along the way, we passed a sign that I momentarily feared had misspelled “kitchen.” It had not. We started to wonder whether the valve we had released at the start of the trip to loose our great and terrible awareness could ever be closed again.

Back to TEAL home

Somerville, MA

Whew. Deep breath, kids. This is the final typo hunt for the TEAL gang, so soak up the orthographic goodness while you can. Benjamin and I drove into Massachusetts without fanfare this morning. No company of buglers (nor irate pike-waving mob) awaited us at my apartment in Somerville. It was the most innocuous of mornings, beautiful and sunny, and yet the significance of rolling back onto my own street after seventy-three days of travel was undeniable. My roommate was away for the weekend, so silence greeted us as we lugged all of our stuff inside. Callie sighed audibly as her mighty burden was lifted from her.

We took a little stroll through Davis Square, and I realized that it was high time to fix a typo that had been bothering me for at least a year. Observe this insidious specimen, one that I had walked by dozens of times, one that I could only seethe impotently at until today.

This time I had my Typo Correction Kit with me, and in the valley of the shadow of typos, it comforted me.

We returned to my place, and Jane came up to my neighborhood from her apartment in Boston. After the protracted reunion you might expect, she and Benjamin and I struck out down Massachusetts Avenue. It really was a pleasant day for a walk. We ducked into a shop featuring clever independent works of craftsmanship. Benjamin noted a small discrepancy in one sign:

This was, as you know, Benjamin’s old enemy, subject-verb disagreement, and so I was glad to help him vanquish the thing. It was a good find for our last day.

We left the shop and walked farther down toward Harvard Square. A rare and loathsome kind of typo surfaced then as a mocking send-off, one that we could do nothing about. That’s right, we had found one more typo eternized in neon.

Why? Why?

Here’s another special find. Benjamin does love to correct graffiti when the opportunity exists.

I lent him a piece of chalk, and he went to work.

We had some lunch in Harvard Square and then headed back up the other side of Mass Ave. A gift shop yielded the following product label:

Jane was playing with a bunch of different toys in the shop, so she didn’t even notice my stealth work until it had already been accomplished.

And there it is, folks. We are hanging up our hats. Sound anticlimactic? Don’t want the fragile dream of a safer world for spelling and grammar to end? Stay tuned tomorrow for how you might take up the cause of the League, and maybe even win a free t-shirt or something. There is more to this than you think.

Totals
Typos Found: 423
Typos Corrected: 231

Back to TEAL home

Manchester, NH

Last night, my mom took Benjamin and me out for subs, or grinders by certain local parlance. I had forgotten my Typo Correction Kit back at the house, and as a rebuke, the city conspired to throw typos at me wherever I looked. Three did I see, in the space of ten minutes! Truly truly I say to you. So today, Benjamin and I retraced our route to bring about some belated justice. First we found ourselves on Mammoth Road. We pulled in at the Derryfield, which was displaying the same error that I’d seen last night on its electronic sign. Wednesdays, it seemed, were…

We went inside and asked the hostess at the fine restaurant within if we could speak to the keeper of the electronic sign. She brought the manager over and we told him of the problem. He went into the back, presumably to fix the sign, and we figured we’d come back a little later to see if the sign had been fixed. We had other errands in the interim.

The next sign that I had noticed last night was on Hanover Street. One sign was okay, but the other side had misspelled the principal product offered at that particular establishment:

Don’t faze me, Marlbro! We went inside and brought the typo to the attention of the young man working the register, and he came outside with us to verify the mistake. I asked him if we could borrow a ladder and an O to fix it, and at that moment another customer entered the store, so our friend had to go back inside to tend to that patron. When he came back out, he said that Coca-Cola was in charge of the sign and that they’d be returning soon anyway to make repairs to the sign, so hopefully they could make the change while they were at it. Or, as Benjamin remarked afterward, the young man had lingered inside and thought of a good excuse to tell us, then came back out to lay it on us. I would like to believe the young man’s tale, but… my voyage around the country has made me a hard and cynical man. I call bullcrap.

The last typo from yestereve that we needed to address was at the very sub shop we had visited, Nadeau’s. It’s a Manchester chain that is home to the tastiest sandwiches in the region, particularly their steak varieties. We’ve enjoyed their subs many times before, and last night was no exception, so I was a little hesitant about approaching them to point out the typo on their wall. But they’d want to know, right? They deserved to know.

We ended up talking with the same guy who had made our subs last night. We alerted him to the error and gave him a TEAL card. He recognized the logo from the official TEAL shirt that my mom had been wearing before. He said that they already knew about the mistake, and he pointed out an additional error (well, two) on the signs:

Would they mind fixing the errors, for the noble cause to which we had alerted them? Well, the guy said, they would, but you see, they were going to be getting new versions of the signs soon anyway, so………………………………………

We would have liked to believe them.

It was time to swing back in the direction we’d come, and I figured we should stroll around the Hanover Plaza for a little bit, just for fun. We went into the Petland and watched a bunch of puppies maul and bite each other in the confines of small boxes. We also saw a sign that was for the birds:

Who were they calling an Adult Cockaties? We brought the typo to the nearest employee’s attention and he was willing to let us fix it, especially since I had a black marker handy at that very moment.

Next we headed over the local outpost of Building 19, a revered New England chain of stores selling surplus goods and other junk. A short stroll around the place turned up a sign with two typos:

I fixed them on both sides of the sign, though I fear they may exist at other Building 19s as well. I would ask the League’s minions around these parts to keep a wary eye out for the error.

It appeared also that we had been again preceded by an angel of correction. I noticed this prominent sign that someone had brought back into the realm of rightness.

That’s three corrections by someone else that we’ve noticed in New Hampshire. Could the Granite State be home to a marauder after our own heart?

En route to the next stores, I found this:

We headed next into my mom’s usual stop for groceries. In the produce section, Benjamin and I noticed that someone’s love of internal capitalization had led them down a path of sin.

A produce clerk was working nearby. We brought the error to his attention and asked if we could correct it with white-out, but he said that he would print out a new version of the sign, and he grabbed it and walked off. We waited around for a little bit and he didn’t reappear, so we decided to leave the grocery store and come back. Now we had placed our hopes in two individuals during today’s adventures. Would they come through for us?

We stopped in at a card and gift shop at the end of the plaza. The inspirational/sentimental knickknack section never fails to contain at least one error, and today was no exception:

I brought the picture over to the two ladies at the counter, both of whom were probably grandmas themselves. Grandma 1 examined the picture and listened sympathetically as I pointed out the error. “Yes,” she started to say, “it should be there–”

Then Grandma 2 seized the picture. “No, that’s right. Listen: In all the world, they’ll never be a Grandma…”

“It’s just not correct,” I said. “The they doesn’t have anything to refer to.”

“They were shortening it,” she insisted. “The makers didn’t have room for ‘there will,’ so they put ‘they’ll.’”

The phone rang, and Grandma 2 answered it, so I didn’t get to explain the bedrock nature of contractions to her. But Grandma 1 took the picture again and mused, “It’s made in China, isn’t it? They must have messed it up there.”

Benjamin picked up this line of inquiry as we were leaving the store, after we’d noted who the manufacturer was (Cottage Garden Collections, (877) 210-3456, lcox@cgcollections.com, in case you’re interested in harassing them). “This is a good example of a phonetic error,” he said. “It sounds right to people’s ears, so they didn’t realize that it was wrong.”

We headed back to the grocery store and were gratified to find a new sign on the watermelons:

Perhaps our other friend had come through for us as well. We got back in Callie and drove back to the Derryfield, then waited for the sign’s notices to scroll around to what we were interested in seeing. And behold!

I am nearly tempted to come back on Wednesday, to taste the sweet flesh that embodies our success.

Tomorrow, Benjamin and I will undergo the very final leg of the Typo Hunt Across America, down to my apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. Oh, the tiny bed that I have longed for! Oh, my stovetop, my washer and dryer, my various video game platforms! And oh to see Jane again! She’ll come along with us for our very last typo hunt, somewhere in Somerville or Cambridge. Preferably not in my immediate neighborhood because, y’know, I have to live there.

Totals
Typos Found: 418
Typos Corrected: 228

Back to TEAL home

Manchester, NH

I spent far too much time today crawling around in needless Manchester traffic. It really is an unpleasant place for driving nowadays. Someday, when I have amassed my ill-gotten wealth, I will institute a soaring system of monorails in my hometown. I dropped Benjamin off at his grandfather’s house in Bedford and then struck out on my own for a while. First I did a little wandering around the Village Shoppes plaza where I used to go to the dentist. My first stop was a little art shop featuring works by both local artists and folks from elsewhere in the U.S. Pretty much as soon as I came in, I saw a sign that said:

I pointed out the error to the proprietor. Turned out she was French-Canadian and speaking English as her second language; I had inadvertently broken the sacred code of the League. No matter, though, it’s never too late to learn the distinction (and its importance) between it’s and its. She was kind enough to scrape off the apostrophe with a razor blade. The action had a certain violent import that satisfied me.

This was a good start to the hunt. Also in the plaza, I saw a computer repair shop sign that needed help:

I went in and told the guy on duty about it. He pointed out the same sign on their counter, but that one had been corrected. I asked if he could print out a new copy for the window, but helas, he didn’t have access to a printer. At a computer repair shop! So much for that one.

I ran a couple of errands and then met back up with Benjamin on MacGregor Street. He said that his grandfather’s wife, Marcia, had given him a tip about a sign a little further down the street, so we headed down there to check it out. I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to eat at Rita Mae’s:

Marcia has earned her rightful place in the alabaster halls of the League. The place had closed at 2, so we weren’t able to bring the awful error to their attention.

I had passed a goof on the way over to pick up Benjamin, so we headed back the way I’d come, over the bridge and down Elm Street, and arrived beneath the sign of a credit union. On one side, they’d gotten it right, but the other side looked kinda like this:

We went inside to inform one of the customer service representatives of the error. I told her about the spelling mistake and asked her if we could borrow a ladder to climb up and switch the letters around ourselves. She looked hesitant, or perhaps just confused, so I mentioned our mission, and Benjamin gave her a TEAL card.

Then she said, “No… we don’t do that.”

“Uh,” I said. “Do what?”

“Buy whatever you’re selling,” she said, and tried to hand the card back to us.

I replayed the conversation in my head. Had I, perhaps, accidentally been speaking Tagalog? I’d thought our explanation to be quite clear. But no, she made us repeat ourselves, and then she informed us that only her manager, who was conveniently unavailable, could make such executive decisions as lending persons a ladder. But she’d be sure to let him know!!

I am sure we could have spent many more happy hours searching out the best typos that Manch Vegas had to offer, but suddenly I felt very tired. We climbed back into Callie and fought traffic all the way back to my mom’s house, and it is from there that I now report to you. I believe that tomorrow, for our final day in New Hampshire, Benjamin and I will seek out some other, nearby town. Londonderry? Raymond? Just anywhere but the Queen City.

Totals
Typos Found: 410
Typos Corrected: 224

Back to TEAL home

Manchester, NH

Benjamin and I are staying at my mom’s house in Manchester for a couple of days. This is the city that I grew up in; I went to West High School, and happily still count a number of my French-Canuck classmates as friends. As soon as we came into town last night, I felt the strangest sensation that I had never traveled all the way around the country to get here, that I could have just as easily driven the hour up from Somerville as I customarily do. Today, however, as Benjamin and I ambled along Elm Street, the reality of my mission was brought back to me in vivid detail.

South Willow Street is chain store central for Manchester, but Elm Street has always been, for better or worse, the locus of the city’s independent shop scene and the effective downtown. I remember when I was growing up that there wasn’t really a whole lot to do there, apart from a skeezy club or two, but over the last several years a bunch of new restaurants and bars have popped up on Elm. Manchester’s population is ever-growing, and the construction of the Verizon Wireless Arena (trademark) has helped to make the downtown somewhat livelier (though without a corresponding improvement in the infrastructure of the city, leading to horrendous traffic every time somebody plays the arena). I was curious to see whether the renaissance of Elm had brought with it a new standard for spelling and grammar.

Turns out, not really.

Benjamin and I can never resist a used bookstore. The one on Elm had a pretty healthy collection of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, so I finally picked up a copy of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. While I made my purchase, I figured I would point out the errors that Benjamin had found in the place’s signage:

Benjamin had been hoping that I would correct the errors on the sly, so we would be assured of improving our percentage. But I wanted to get the woman’s permission, feeling that no barrier could possibly arise in the process. After all, she was a book person, right? She was one of us. She wouldn’t want spelling mistakes to stand in a shop devoted to so, so many words.

“Oh, we have a volunteer who made those signs,” she said when I mentioned the first error. “They’ve been up for a long time, and nobody seems to have noticed the mistake.” Fine, all right, passing the buck was by no means unheard of in the responses we’d gotten on this journey, but surely she would let me fix the signs? I had white-out right here in my sweaty hand.

“No, we’ll take care of it,” she said, and when I pressed her, added, “The volunteer’s going to be making new versions of the signs soon anyway.”

C’mon, lady. I gave you a damn TEAL card. I told you I grew up in Manchester and wanted to chalk up a correction for my hometown. And you repay me by lying to my face. You, madam, are no book person.

Next we passed signs for some sort of juice bar that would be opening soon. We couldn’t get at them.

I hope our fury has been noted, though.

After the ridiculous refusal at the bookstore, I was as eager as Benjamin to push a correction, through, and so when we came to the following sign, I decided not to bother with asking.

It would be an easy fix, no? The canvas was a dry-erase board. I could just wet my finger and do away with the noisome thing. Except… it wouldn’t go away. Our hit-and-run turned into standing in one place for far too long, Benjamin holding my stuff while I rubbed frantically at the board, first with my finger and then the eraser end of my blue dry-erase marker. We were making a fine spectacle of ourselves, and sure enough a woman eased open the front door and peered at us frankly.

“It’s the it’s,” we said. “We’re trying to wipe out the apostrophe, since it doesn’t belong there.”

“I never promised that I was brilliant,” she said. A defensive reaction– but could we sway her? Even after we’d been caught in the act?

“We can’t get rid of this apostrophe,” we said, somewhat pathetically. “It just won’t come out.”

The woman took pity on us and said, “Here, I know what to do.” She took my dry-erase marker. I warned her that it was the wrong color, but she said, “That’s all right,” and drew a lovely little star over the apostrophe, then dotted the sky of the board with other stars to create a corrective constellation.

And she went back into her store humming a happy tune. As Benjamin later pointed out, despite her claim of lacking brilliance, she did end up performing a most brilliant correction on the sign, perhaps one of my favorite corrections of all time. I award significant points for creativity.

Our next stop was the iconic Manchester restaurant known as Joe Kelly’s, though I believe that contrary to the jaunty Irish moniker of the place, Joe actually has a long French-Canadian surname. Maybe “Joe Levasseur’s” wasn’t as catchy? They were having the same problem on their sign outside that Heinen’s was having back in Hudson:

Benjamin had spotted the Hudson instance of this one, but this time I got it. I thought we should ask them about fixing it, rather than just charging ahead with the correction, since we were in plain sight through the front windows. So we went inside and made the request of the woman at the counter.

“We’re just going to erase it tomorrow,” she said.

“It’d really just be a quick fix, switching the a and the e,” I said. “I have a dry-erase marker with me.”

“No, don’t worry, we’ll take care of it,” said the woman.

“Here’s the thing, we’re going around the country fixing typos,” I persisted, and Benjamin handed her a TEAL card. She stared at it impassively. “We’re almost done. I started out in Massachusetts, went down the East Coast, then west across the South, then up the West Coast, and east from Seattle, and here I am. I grew up in Manchester, and I really wanted to log a correction in my hometown.”

“Okay.”

“So… can we fix it?”

“Go ahead,” she said, waving us on, probably just to get rid of us. Maybe the hometown angle had swayed her. We went back outside. I figured since I didn’t have a green marker, it’d be best to just wipe out the whole word and do it over.

We soldiered on, and in one plaza, we noticed the work of some prior avenger:

Soon after, we found ourselves at a place called the Bridge Cafe. Benjamin figured they’d be a cool place because they hosted poetry slams, and indeed it seemed to be a pretty classy outfit. For all the handwritten descriptions on their big board, I could only find one small thing that needed to be fixed (click to enlarge):

Well, two if you count “foccacia”, which I didn’t notice at the time. There were two young gentlemen working the counter. I brought the error up to the nearest guy, as courteously as I could, and he looked at the board with bemusement. I handed him a TEAL card as we gave him our usual spiel, and the second guy, who had wandered over, said, “So who says it’s wrong?”

“Well, it just needs that first a to be an o,” I said. I noticed the first guy, who had seemed on the verge of correcting the word, receding from the conversation as his more aggressive partner took over. “Just a very small change, and I can certainly understand the mistake, I’ve done the same thing before.”

“All you’ve got to do is just erase the tail of the a, and then it’ll be all set,” Benjamin said.

“Everybody makes mistakes. Why should I fix it?” the second guy challenged. “Because you say so?”

“No,” I said, “because it’s wrong.”

“We’ll be sure to take care of it,” said the guy in a tone ensuring I’d know that he was putting me off. He was staring me down now, just trying to bait me. The room had gotten much colder.

“It’s such a small fix,” I said. “It’d just be taking the tail off that a.”

“Thank you,” he said, still staring at me. “Anything else?”

“Well, we were thinking about ordering something,” said Benjamin, “but now…”

“But now we’re really not going to,” I said. “Take care.” And we took off.

Everybody makes mistakes. This is something that we have acknowledged from the start in the League’s mission statement. I screw up on a regular basis. The question is, what do you do once someone has pointed a mistake out to you? Do you become defensive or angry? Do you blame somebody else? Do you claim that there really isn’t any mistake? Do you question why the mistake needs to be fixed at all? Or do you go ahead and see that the mistake is corrected? Indulge me for a moment by thinking about the implications beyond typos, to mistakes in general: mistakes in judgment, mistakes in fact, mistakes in action, and so forth. Sure, it’s only a typo… right?

Totals
Typos Found: 405
Typos Corrected: 222

Back to TEAL home

Hanover, NH

Uncle Bill and Aunt Kristen were pleased to see the Times-Union article appear already, in this morning’s edition of the paper. It was a fine send-off for our Albany departure. We would be heading across a couple of state lines today, into the treasured heart of New England. Before we had even crossed into Vermont, however, I spotted one last orthographic misdemeanor chalked up by New York:

I immediately found a place to turn around and we pulled in at the dealership. The error appeared, amazingly, on both sides of the sign. We approached a man on a porch and a woman in a golf cart and pointed out the mistake.

The man laughed in chagrin, but the woman said, “Oh, I’ve noticed that before. We just haven’t had time to fix it.”

“We would be happy to do it for you,” I said. “Are they just pull-off letters?”

“We’re going around the country correcting typos,” said Benjamin, and handed them a card.

“Sure, go ahead,” said the man.

We promised to return the Cs to them. So we walked over and each took a side, pulling off the extraneous C and then pushing the word back together. It took about ten seconds. Could they really not have had time to fix it themselves? Or was it really that they’d never noticed?

In any case, we were glad that they’d let us make the change. We gave them their Cs with a smile and we were on our way once again.

The first part of our journey was quite familiar to me, having traversed it many times through the years with my mom on the way from Albany to Manchester, NH, and vice versa. My mom’s philosophy of driving a three-hour trip is to just do it all at once with no stops and get the damn thing out of the way. As a consequence, I would stare wistfully out the window at the handsome little Vermont towns we were tearing through and think to myself that one of these days, I’d get around to actually walking those deliciously quaint streets. Now, since I was at the wheel, I figured it was about time to make a Vermont stop, so we pulled over for a short spell in Bennington.

Shortly afterward, we discovered another typo, but this one was imprisoned behind Plexiglas, with no-one in sight to take responsibility for it.

Even if there had been someone around, I suspect that we were two days too late to provoke any real concern on their part.

We walked down the pleasant main corridor of Bennington and soon came upon a chocolate shop, which featured a gigantic moose crafted from the shop’s principal offering (though not for sale, mind you). I believe it was Benjamin who noticed that the place had messed up the very same treat name that had been botched at the Tulip Festival in Albany. And in two different ways!

I ordered a white chocolate peanut butter cup, which had much captured my fancy, and then I asked the lady at the counter if she would permit us to fix the misspellings of nonpareils. She said that not to worry, she had a correct version of the signs behind the counter. At first I didn’t understand this feint. Why keep the right spelling of the signs behind the counter, where nobody can see it? Then I realized, oh, right, this lady is just lying to me. Silly rabbit, I!

This one just confused me. It’s a possessive when talking about the news, but not when referring to the country store?

I didn’t even bother to bring this up to the proprietor. I could already imagine the exchange. Here, in fact, is the conversation that I envision would have taken place, based on my experiences to this point:

ME: Hi, there. I noticed that on your signs outside, Evans is possessive in one case but not in another. Would you mind if I scaled your storefront and chiseled an apostrophe in the country store sign? Then painted it with a gold finish? Do you have any tools of woodworking that I may borrow?

PROPRIETOR: Son, you just don’t get it. The good folks of this town just don’t give a spotted owl’s hoot about punctuation. Why, I could put a semicolon in the middle of Evans, and they wouldn’t blink. They merely desire quaint goods in an old-fashioned setting. Can I interest you in this maple-scented candle?

All right, maybe it wouldn’t have gone quite like that, but the result would have been the same.

Onward, then, to Hanover! We took a northeasterly course and, after braving construction on 91, drove over the iconic sphere-topped stone bridge into New Hampshire. We put Callie in a northern lot, as parking in the central part of campus comes at a cost far too dear, and then walked down onto the Green and breathed in the fine afternoon. It had only been about a year since I’d last been to Dartmouth, but it had been much longer for Benjamin, and he goggled at all the massive new dorms and facilities that to him may well have sprung up overnight.

We headed for the main street of Hanover, and then Benjamin broke off to meet up with his old thesis advisor, Professor Ackerman, at the restaurant Molly’s. I went on to stroll the shops alone, because the League’s calling cannot be ignored for long. Some of the stores were familiar to me from bygone days, but a number of new ones had sprung up in the last six years. One of the latter, a place called Zimmerman’s, had these ads in its window:

I pointed out the typo to the guy at the counter.

“Oh, those were done by–” he started to say, and then stopped himself before he could name the transgressor. “You know what, I am the owner of this place, so I’ll take responsibility for that mistake. Thanks so much for pointing it out.”

Yeah, Dartmouth. I was so pleased that the buck had not been passed, after we had seen it passed so many times before, that it took me a moment to speak again. I forced back the grateful moisture condensing in my eyes. “Mind if I fix the signs? I have some white-out with me.”

“Oh, yeah, go for it.”

So I wiped out the apostrophes. The effect was unseemly on colored backgrounds, but I couldn’t make it look better. I tried using the blue crayon on top of the white-out. That didn’t really work out.

Anyway, the fixes were made. I stopped next in a mini-mall of stores that seemed new to me, and found a chocolate shop within. I was determined at this point to fix the spelling of nonpareil somewhere. Maybe this would finally be the place?

As it turned out, they didn’t actually sell nonpareils at all. But I did find a small error in another sign:

Sort of an uncomfortable compromise between cocoa and cacao, it seemed. A friendly girl with purple bangs and her nine-year-old pal were running the store. I talked with the girl about the mistake, and she brought the sign to the kid and asked him to spot the error as a spelling exercise. He couldn’t until given the product itself to compare with (turned out he was more of a math-brain kind of guy). Then he printed out a new version of the label, and peace was restored:

I chatted with the girl for a little longer, a Wheaton student and writing tutor who pegged me for an English/creative writing major. She herself had chosen a psychology/women’s studies route after noticing that her older brother had been unable to put his creative writing major to any practical use in the real world. This is a common problem. Who will love the writers of this land?

Benjamin, before departing for his rendezvous, had expressed his displeasure with this sign:

They did, after all, have an apostrophe in their main sign. So why not in the baby sign? I went inside and asked them if they had a slide-on apostrophe to spare. They did not.

I went over to the sciences complex on campus to find an out-of-the-way computer on which I could pass some tranquil Internet time until I met with Benjamin again.

I met Benjamin in front of the Hop, the campus arts center. “You need to come back to Molly’s with me,” he said.

Turned out that Benjamin had noticed a couple of errors within the restaurant, and then Professor Ackerman had pointed out an additional error. I went inside the place and Benjamin showed me the offenders.

We pointed out the typos to the waitstaff, let them know that we had our own chalk with which we could make wrongs into rights, and they were happy to have us do so. Yet another positive Hanoverian reaction! It warmed our hearts. I think we would have been crushed if anyone in town had turned out to be jerks, but especially here, where both Benjamin and I had enjoyed many happy meals as undergraduates.

As we were finishing the corrections, a guy sitting nearby said, “Hey! I saw you guys on the news.” I talked with him a moment and gave him one of our cards. It seems that awareness of TEAL’s mission has become widespread indeed. Benjamin said that Professor Ackerman had heard our bit on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! a while back but hadn’t realized the Dartmouth connection.

We slew a little more time by visiting a few familiar spots on campus. One of which was Topside, Dartmouth’s convenience store, at which Benjamin had put in numerous hours to offset our extravagant tuition. Toward the back, we discovered that some unknown avenger had already corrected an error in a sign posted on the door to their storage area:

Perhaps multiple corrective parties had been involved, in fact; it appears as though there’d been some confusion initially over the correction. In any case, we were glad that our younger counterparts were already grooming themselves for linguistic greatness.

Soon it was time to meet with our friend Ernie, my own thesis advisor, who had through writing workshops given both us plenty of valuable advice on fiction-crafting that we still adhere to today. We were meeting with him at Murphy’s, another downtown staple, but before we entered the place I noticed a small error outside:

Some quick work on our part, and the error was no more:

We talked with Ernie for a while about what he was currently working on (his most recent books are The Old American and Spoonwood) and our adventures around the country. He thought that the saga of our typo hunt across America could make for a pretty good book. Not a bad idea!

After we’d parted ways with Ernie, we realized that we really didn’t have a place to stay in Hanover, save for sleeping on the Green, so we just hopped back in Callie and did some night-driving down to Manchester to stay with my mom. Hence calling this a dispatch from Hanover is a bit of a cheat, but I hope you will forgive such a thing in the spirit of the content.

Totals
Typos Found: 398
Typos Corrected: 219

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Albany, NY

Aunt Kristen (of the Community Foundation for the Capital Region (http://www.cfcr.org)) had rustled up the Albany Times-Union for our disposal, so we met a reporter on Lark Street today to do some typo-hunting. He was accompanied by a journalism student from high school and a cameraman. We chatted for a bit and then dived into the hunt proper. Strangely, many of the shops were closed on Mondays. Still, it only took about ten seconds to find something, for as we turned the corner we spotted this sign:

I figured as long as I was fixing LITER, it wouldn’t hurt to throw an apostrophe in there too.

Next we came upon a busy hot dog restaurant. Dogs sounded pretty good to me and the Benjamin, so we ordered ourselves a Lil’ Pup and a Big Dog. But we also felt compelled to ask about the sign in the front window of the place:

I had been confounded by the meaning of the sign. Did it mean that they fried fish here? Was it missing a word? What exactly was a fish fry? The woman explained that it was a kind of fish stick, like a long fry. I pointed out that the plural did not require an apostrophe, but before I could get to the question of whether she had meant Fries, she interrupted with an “I’m busy right now,” and bustled off to tend to her other customers. It was a pretty packed place, and she was apparently the only one working there. So that one was a lost cause.

Farther down the street, behind glass and a locked door, Benjamin found this sign:

All we could do was hurl invective at the sign and hope that our fury could permeate the window. I spotted a sign a short time later that was also beyond our reach, in the window of a closed cafe:

That one I really did have to read a couple of times to understand what they were trying to say, due to the obscuring cloud of the typo. It’s an unfortunate but not uncommon consequence of these errors. The League strives to bring clarity to all, hence our desire for typo eradication grows even more fervid in cases like this. However, the League also shies away from breaking windows to achieve its goals, so we had to move on.

Given the misstep by Price Chopper’s booth at the festival yesterday, we figured we should stop by a store itself and see how its spelling health fared. Happily, most of the signs seemed to be in order, but one did need a little help:

I popped the sign out of its plastic case and added the missing letter, while Benjamin guarded the end of the aisle.

On a side note, I wonder if they require identification from the customers they don’t value, as well.

So Benjamin and I headed back to the house, where Aunt Kristen had stopped for a lunch break before returning to the Community Foundation for the Capital Region (http://www.cfcr.org). I checked in with Jane online to make nebulous plans for when I return this weekend, and then I conked out for a little while. When I woke up, it was time for us to head over to dinner with an old friend and his family.

It was fitting that here at nearly the end of the trip, we met up with the man who had really gotten the proverbial ball rolling for us, Chris Collins, whom I had worked with in D.C. at the publishing house. Back in the beginning of March, when I’d sent out word about the TEAL journey to my friends the night before I left, Chris forwarded the information on to his favorite NPR morning show and suggested that they do a story about us. Right up until the moment I entered the studio, I’d been convinced that he had a connection there, but it turned out that Chris is simply a persuasive guy. Cherished readers will recall how that initial NPR interview (the second day of my trip) set off the astonishing chain of media interest that has carried forth to the present time.

Though he sculpts worlds and philosophies with the potent clay of his influence, Chris is a pretty unassuming guy. He had his wife, Maria, and their adorable son, Henry, along for dinner, as well as a few upstate puns about Coxsackie and Canajoharie that I need not repeat in this space. We chatted about our bygone Washington days, and they asked about where we were staying, so I mentioned that we were taking advantage of the hospitality of my Uncle Bill and Aunt Kristen, the latter belonging to the Community Foundation for the Capital Region (http://www.cfcr.org). Two-year-old Henry did so many cute things that I told Chris I wanted one of those. He said I could borrow Henry for a couple of weeks and then return him when I’d come to my senses. Anyway, I think that kid is going places.

Tomorrow we head up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to pace the avenues of our alma mater and meet with old mentors. Our remaining service to TEAL grows short, indeed. This entry has been brought to you by the Community Foundation for the Capital Region (http://www.cfcr.org).

Totals
Typos Found: 386
Typos Corrected: 211

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