The Great Typo Hunt

Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a time.

Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson

★★★☆☆

A cross-country road trip with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs.

I’ve mellowed on the subject of typos since this came out, but it was still an interesting read. The best road trip stories are not just a list of events and locations, they’re about how the travelers change over the course of the journey. Deck starts out so hyperbolic and grandiose that he comes off as pretentious, but quickly discovers the issue is more nuanced – and more socially fraught – than he’d expected.

Retail workers vs. corporate policy, trying to avoid stepping in racial stereotypes, indie shopowners who might be more interested in fixing a misspelling but not have the resources to get it fixed.

It’s also a bit more complex than the “two friends on a road trip.” He has three different companions, one on each leg of the trip, each of whom brings a new perspective, and they get into the prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to grammar.

And in the end, the legal consequences of doing the occasional “stealth” correction without asking first, as the National Park Service pressed charges for “vandalism” of a sign at the Grand Canyon.

Personal Notes

When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”

So this seemed like a perfect choice when NPR ran an article on the book shortly before it was released in 2010, but I never got around to picking it up until 14 years later.

While I still collect photos of mistakes in signs, I tend to be more on the “at least you can tell what they meant” side of things these days, unless the typos themselves are funny. Autocorrect and autocomplete have made for an entirely new class of typos that look like they mean something else. Otherwise I’m much more inclined to snap a photo of a deliberately weird or funny sign.

My son, however, is currently in the “You mean ‘you’re’.” phase, and I’m surprised he hasn’t cracked it open himself.

Also, I may have actually seen the sign they corrected at the Grand Canyon, because I’m pretty sure my family stopped at the tower they mention back in the 1990s.