Picky wordsmith or Jack Kerouac with a Sharpie?
After attending his 5-year college reunion, Jeff Deck asked himself, “What can I do, what is my special power?”
Deck and Herson's mission was to fix typos like this one seen in Illinois.
Noticing a sign in his neighborhood which read: “No tresspassing” was his “Aha!” moment.
It occurred to Deck that he could do something about typos in the wild. He and his buddy Benjamin D. Herson took off on a 2 1/2-month journey around the United States, tracking the misspelled word.
With their typo correction kit (a rainbow array of Sharpie pens, chalk, pens) in hand, they set off on their journey.
The pair found 437 typos and of those they were able to correct a little over half of them. Mosty, they negotiated with local storeowners. But every once in a while, Deck said, they didn’t ask permission and resorted to stealth corrections.
Deck and Herson have just published ‘The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time,’ a book about their travels. I’m sure it was one of the most closely proofed manuscripts of all time.
Want to track their journey: There’s a website for that. GreatTypoHunt.com.
What was the most common mistake? Apostrophe mistakes. Most common: Extraneous apostrophe. One example, in Idaho: Restroom’s.
What did Deck learn? Independent neighborhood stores were a little more in need of assistance, Deck said, but on the whole, the duo learned that everyone really does make mistakes.
In the book, they tell a story of not just mistakes, instead they reflect on topics including education, assumptions, communication, and taboo conversations.
- Deck tells his story to NPR’s Talk of the Nation: A man, a plan, and a Sharpie
Lest you think these are just a couple of unemployed copy editors roaming the country, NO. There’s no journalism on their resumes, but they definitely embody the spirit of many picky wordsmiths we’ve all known and loved, don’t they?
