Ever Northward
Portland, OR
Not much to report today. As with yesterday, we spent most of today driving to get to the next West Coast point of actual interest, so that means little to no time left over for typo-scouting. But don’t worry, we’ll be staying in Portland tomorrow night as well and should have plenty of opportunities to help the fair city in affairs orthographic during the day.
Our journey northward took us through more rich green territory and fantastic forestland. This coast is becoming almost monotonous in its utterly uniform beauty (well, except for L.A., and they had to try really hard to make it that odious). We crossed into Oregon early on and thus spent our several hours of driving today plowing through most of the state. Portland is just a sneeze from becoming part of Washington state. We realized today that Oregon shares a couple of oddball practices with East Coast states familiar to us: like New Jersey, they don’t let you pump your own gas, and like New Hampshire, my home state, there is no sales tax. Gas prices were refreshingly in the 3.50s, as opposed to the pushing-four-dollar rates just south in its fuel-surcharge-burdened neighbor.
Josh put his Yelp network to use once again in determining our source of sustenance for the evening, and so we wound up at a fairly new microbrewery/burger place called Hopworks. The place was terrific. Then we retired to the hotel, a step up from the cheap hotels that Benjamin and I often resorted to on our leg of the trip. Josh and I had gotten a good deal on the place, again thanks to Josh’s web savvy, using a bidding site. I reflected on how useful it was to have a maven of the internet along on this part of the trip, especially when I felt too tired to bother with trying to figure out that stuff myself (increasingly often). It’s also good that Josh is interested in figuring out the worthwhile stuff to see in each of our landing spots. I have already absorbed so much during this long journey that sometimes I feel that I don’t particularly care about seeing anything else. Then, when cajoled into a new excursion, I recall that it is indeed worth the effort.
It sure would be nice to sleep more, though. I am at heart a slothful creature.
Here is a rather pathetic offering for today, culled from a certain Inn’s suggested list of area attractions.
White-out applied, an extremely local fix. The only way to effect change on a hotel-wide level will be to alert the management upon check-out. Until then, we must content ourselves with the tiny corner of rectitude we have swept out for ourselves.
Totals
Typos Found: 185
Typos Corrected: 111
April 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I’ll be in Portland in a week. If only your trip intersected with mine! I would love the chance to correct typos with you guys. Alas.
P.S. Gas in Florida is only $3.33. See? You should’ve ventured here after all. ;o)
April 15th, 2008 at 10:07 am
You didn’t correct the error I thought you would (until I saw the ubiquitous “it’s”). I’m pretty sure there are no such things as water sprouts. The inn wants you to know about water spouts. (Recently saw a cool one on Kauai.) Perhaps you don’t have them on the east coast and are forgiven. But, hmmm… they are talking about a playground, not a natural formation. You got me….
April 15th, 2008 at 10:10 am
And, yes, Kari and I will miss you by a couple of weeks in both Portland and Seattle. Ah well.
Keep those spirits up–travel can wear you down, but the experiences can lift you up. Or something…
How about: Keep on keepin’ on.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:41 am
you guys are completely insane! i love it!
April 15th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Ahh, I’ll look into that, Sue! Nice work.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Since the typo flow is slower with all your travel to Portland, I thought you’d like to know that spring and typo eradication are in the air in New York and LA.
New York City corrects its own typo after four days…for more info, see “Merser Street? That ‘C’ Looks Awfully Curvy” at http://www.nysun.com/news/new-york/merser-street-%E2%80%98c%E2%80%99-looks-awfully-curvy
Also, is it a typo if it’s the wrong word altogether? LA Times blog the Daily Dish mistakenly wrote “copyright” when they should have said “trademark” (whoa — big difference). I commented and blogged on it at http://learningtoeat.com/2008/04/11/learning-to-fact-check-copyright-vs-trademark/
Safe travels!
April 15th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Press on, O valiant soldiers, and be not weary in well-doing! Thy duty awaits thee!
April 15th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
I found out about you guys on another Blog. As one of those who holds that “what do you do with it” degree in English I am thrilled to hear of your much needed journey!! I just received an e-mail from a congressman that had two typos within the first paragraph…a congressman!!! So, godspeed; I wish I could join you!!
April 15th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Jeff,
When you rolling into Tacoma? I need to clean my place up a little. Oh good news. The furnace just died, so its really warm in here now. Drop me an email and I’ll get you my phone number–guess I should have given that to you a while back.
Carson
April 15th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
OoOoO, I can not wait for the Janebear head to pop up on the map!!!:)
April 16th, 2008 at 1:20 am
You’re drawing near to me now, so I hereby renew my offer of a drink / lunch / crash-space in Ellensburg (just east of the Cascades) if you feel the need for any or all of those. One catch though: I’ll be out of town (in Oregon, actually, not too far from Portland) from the 18th to the 20th. So I hope you’re not planning to be coming past me then. I really want to shake your hand. (Oh, no — should that be ’shake your hands’, since there are two of you? For I do want to shake both of your hands. That is, I want to shake one hand belonging to each of you. Dear me, this English language is a bit of a mess sometimes. This is why predicate logic was invented.)
April 16th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Gazza, happily Jane and I will be passing through Ellensburg on the 21st on our way to Spokane, so lunch is theoretically possible. I’ll e-mail you my cell number and we’ll see about making it happen!
April 16th, 2008 at 8:08 am
While the the second typo you came across was obvious.
I would of thought the error was “a apple crispy” - should it not be “an apple crispy”?
April 16th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
As one who corrects spelling/grammar professionally (as a university English instructor), I can appreciate your worthy quest. The common errors in student papers are increasingly horrifying, I’m sad to report.
Any possibility of making TEAL a national movement? If so, I’m in.
You must, at least, have some cool “TEAL” T-shirts made up for sale! Seriously, we must all strive to “fix” what has become an epidemic of basic linguistic ignorance, even if it is just a bit at a time. Knowing you’re out there on the watch is a comfort.
(Can’t help myself–Niall, we have no such word combination as “would of” or “should of.” It only SOUNDS like it whe we use the contraction of would have, as in “would’ve.”)
April 17th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Jude, check out the t-shirts link off the main TEAL page. I earn a whopping $1.50 profit per shirt… I have made at least TWENTY DOLLARS by now. That’s a quarter of a gas tank.
April 17th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Shouldn’t “state of the art”, when used as an adjective, be hyphenated?
June 8th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
But none of what you’re going after and correcting are typos. The good lord Wickipedia agrees they’re not typos - “A typographical error or typo is a mistake made during, originally, the manual type-setting (typography) of printed material, or more recently, the typing process. The term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, but excludes errors of ignorance.”
I’m absolutely in favor of correcting errors of illiteracy and ignorance, but I wish we’d come up with a more accurate label than “typos.” Typos, the perpetrator will notice on a second viewing; illiteracies will look just as good to their author on subsequent readings. We all make typos - I certainly do. I then notice and correct most of them.
Machiya in Portland, where Margie Boule’s column just appeared today.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Machiya– it’s not always easy to determine what’s an error of carelessness and what’s an error of ineducation. We are intentionally stretching the definition of typo to include both, because there were plenty of times where we weren’t sure which kind of error it was (and would hate to just assume it was the latter type).
Take Boule’s column, where both Somerville and Milwaukee were misspelled. In this age of Google Maps and Wikipedia, we’d be reasonable to assume that those were errors of carelessness, but what if the copy editors really thought that’s how the city names were spelled? (I hear *Milwaukie* is the name for a Portland suburb; that could be a potential source of confusion.) Could we no longer call those typos? How would you even know?