Typo Hunt Across America

Lafayette, LA

I think I will have the pleasure of posting an entry relatively early, for once. Such a phenomenon is beneficial to my sleep cycle, but also is especially useful tonight, as there is a bar in the backyard of the place we’re staying and I have a free drink coupon. Jeff could use a couple of brews, he could. Tomorrow we cross into Texas and I must be prepared.

Late last night, heavy rains and gusts attacked the parking lot of the almost-cheap motel we were staying at. By the morning, the grounds were dry once more, but the temperature had been left in a state hovering around the low sixties, with the wind dragging the perceived temperature down still further. Benjamin and I actually had to put on our jackets. (I am sure my mock complaints here will draw snarls and catcalls from my friends and family back in New England; those hardy souls can expect overnight lows in the thirties and snow showers tomorrow morning.) We had only a short drive to Lafayette, thanks to the extra ground we’d covered yesterday evening, but the trip was almost entirely over a highway bridge straddling swamp country, and the knobby texture of the road set our bowels all a-quiver. One truck carrying a prefab house had lost a whole wing of the damn thing, thanks to surface vibrations that, over time, must have finally unhinged it. We were thankful to arrive at our destination intact.

The hostel wouldn’t be open for check-in for a while yet, so we decided to take a stroll down one of the main drags in Lafayette to see what was shaking. Turned out we’d be staying pretty near the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We had to fulfill our sworn and sacred duties as emissaries from TEAL, so we put on our student disguises and infiltrated the campus. Nothing much was happening there; seemed like everyone was off on spring break. We entered one building and found the same old boring typo that dully plagues the nation over:

This poster was from an organization that had doubtless plastered their “literature” all over the celebrated state of Louisiana. Thus correcting it here would do no good toward addressing the larger problem. Nevertheless, I could not resist turning my white-out ‘pon the two copies, at least, that confronted us now.

A saunter into the campus bookstore and school apparel shop yielded a puzzling sign. Not just for the lack of an apostrophe in women’s (which they did get right in another sign), but for the product description itself:

What does the listed price actually get you? Only half a product? Are they charging twenty-eight to thirty-four dollars per pant? These are troubling times. We would have inquired further, but could not think of a good way to ask clarifying questions about women’s lounge pants.

Our final visit was to a New Age store set a little back from the road, groaning under a magnificent handpainted sign featuring a gypsy doing… something gypsy-like, I couldn’t tell what. The woman behind the counter looked up as we entered and gave us a vaguely transcendent smile, then went back to reading her text on chakras. I happened to find myself in the vicinity of boon-granting jewelry.

How cheap for an artifact of concentrated potency. But how sad that it was being sold under the wrong name! There are some ancient cultures that believe that to name something is to own it, to control it on some metaphysical level. I realized that, in this way, the misnomer for these items might have a damaging impact on their efficacy, so I said, “Excuse me, I was wondering if I could add an e to your sign here?”

“What, now?” said the woman at the counter.

“It says power braclet, not bracelet.”

She peered at the sign. “Oh, right!”

“Can I fix it, then?” I requested again.

“No, that’s all right,” she said. “I’ll take it home with me and fix it there. Thank you for pointing it out, though.”

“I could fix it right now,” I persisted, showing her the Kit. “I’ve got the right kind of marker, right here.”

“No,” she said firmly. I saw that the last of her Age of Aquarius bonhomie had faded, and that she would hurt me if I asked again. I knew then in my deepest heart that, like so many before her, she had lied to me. The sign would never be fixed. It would say braclet until it was yellowed and faded, if the store stuck around that long, and by then the woman would have found another type of trinket to ascribe arcane properties to, and would place that trinket in the braclets’, I mean, bracelets’ place. Then it’d be like I had never pointed out the error to her at all. Oh loss!

We returned to the hostel for checking in, and it is from that cozy place that I now report to you. Soon a Cajun jam band will be playing in that bar in the backyard, and Benjamin and I will soak up the last of Louisiana’s hearty offerings before traveling to the land beneath a lone and broiling star.

Totals
Typos Found: 53
Typos Corrected: 28

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Louisiana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.