Tag Archives: rural versus urban

The Monday Book: THE GREAT TYPO HUNT

Posted on by
3

The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time

typo huntI picked up this book because a couple of years ago, some friends and I temporarily banded together in an organization called the Guerrilla Grammar Girls. It doesn’t really exist anymore as planned, but I figured the book would be fun.

It was actually a lot more thought-provoking than expected. Jeff Deck is a former magazine editor, his co-author Benjamin Herson a bookstore manager. They did a cross-country road trip looking for and correcting typos wherever they found them: on the beaches, in the stores, and during one encounter with lasting repercussions, at the Grand Canyon.

Deck began to notice, driving about with his companions (Herson for the most part, but his girlfriend rode shotgun for part of the trip) that the places where typos were most likely to occur were the places they most wanted to be, such as mom-n-pops and independent retailers–often in rural areas, but always off the beaten track.

(They must not have visited many Walmarts, I feel compelled to add, or that theory would have died, but never mind, back to the book.)

Their need to correct, uphold, and defend English grammar and spelling got a bit tangled with their wish to understand how mistakes happened in the first place–particularly those pesky apostrophes as possessives versus plurals–but it also got mixed into that afore-mentioned discussion about urban versus rural and corporate versus independent. Was cutting slack for “folksie” demeaning or appropriate? This never really resolved itself in their repeated and rapid-fire dialogues as they traversed the country eating cheap fast food and staying in Econolodges or KOA campgrounds.

What did happen was their correction of a Grand Canyon information sign that was in and of itself, a national monument. Mary Colter was a folk artist who painted the sign in 1932, using womens’ instead of women’s. Deck and Herson had a full-on correction kit, complete with markers, chalk, whiteout and a few stick-on items, which they carried with them into the Canyon. You can guess what happened to the sign. A few months later, they found themselves in court on criminal charges of defacing Colter’s work.

It does strike me as odd Deck and Herson never aligned the significance of folk art, protected heritage, and rural independence a la the Colter sign debacle to their discussion of how independent businesses and rural locations are more likely to produce typos, but there are plenty of other philosophy moments to chew on in this book.

The writing, I say at the risk of being judgmental, is sometimes a bit blowsy, striving for cuteness rather than clarity, yet endearing at points, and entertaining almost all the time. They’re good at capturing the attitudes and diverse reactions of the people they encountered on the trip. Just imagine what it would be like to walk up to people all over the States and say, “Excuse me, but there’s a typo on your sign. Want me to correct if for you?” Some of the responses are pure psychological study, while others are straight stand-up comedy.

If you’re the grammarian about whom mothers warn their children, you’ll enjoy The Great Typo Hunt.

Sleeping on Iron(y)ed Sheets

Posted on by
1

Anyone who travels for work—book tours, corporate sales, what have you—knows the exhaustion of sleep in strange beds. Each city this book tour has taken us to—New York with its taxi honk operas, Philadelphia and the late night peace protest sing-alongs, Charlotte with that steady humming undercurrent of Big Money—we’ve hunkered into provided beds, covers pulled around our ears, and reached for the dubious slumber of country mice away from home.

So we were delighted when a three-day break let us sleep in our own little beds again. We arrived back at the bookstore, admired Andrew the Shopsitter’s latest innovations (this guy is a gem) and fell into bed.

Then Jack began to cough. And cough and cough and cough, the kind that medical professionals would call “unproductive,” what moms call “dry tickly.”

Or just bloody annoying. The sound of one’s spouse hacking up a lung in small pieces is heartrending, but for someone having her first night in the ol’ home place since Oct. 5th, it’s also bad timing. He tried NyQuil, extra pillows, throat lozenges, as I lay by his side in supportive wife mode, hoping. About 3 in the morning, Jack turned to me. “Go sleep in the living room. Your patient, understanding silence is getting on my nerves.”

The next day Jack announced that after I’d left, he’d stopped coughing.  “Which means the cabin will be okay.” I had a media interview in the early evening, but then we planned to flee to our two-room shack in the woods—so far back that Internet and phone service are not available, and if we hear a motor, it’s coming to us—until time to leave for Asheville Sunday.

The interview ran long because Kim (a writer for the paper in Southern Pines, NC) and I really hit it off, so we got down to the cabin about 9 pm—or, as my friend Heather says, about half an hour past my bedtime. We spooned into slumber beneath the comfy duvet…

…and woke at 1 am to a noise reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project.

“Dafuq?” my husband more or less mumbled, snatching up a nearby hardback and preparing to defend me to the last page. Book in assault position, he traversed the perimeter.

A homegrown girl, I knew. “It’s a mouse.” Locating the noise, I banged on the dresser and began opening drawers to reveal the (now empty) nest. We crawled back into our home turf bed.

The mouse crawled back to hers. And began to install a bowling alley. I got up and banged the dresser. Silence—and then a single acorn came spewing over the top of a drawer, as if fired from a cannon.

I went back to bed. The mouse invited friends over, one of whom played saxophone. There was also a bagpiper, and I think an electric keyboard player. I rose, banged the dresser, and shouted, “Lissen, if you little bastards don’t stop, I’ll call the law, do you hear me? There are noise ordinances! It’s 4 in the morning!”

My husband switched on the bedside lamp and peered at me closely. “What?” I snapped.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he said, smiling in a don’t-hurt-me way. “Come back to bed, darling. You’ve had a long couple of weeks.”

At 5 am the mouse partiers headed home. We heard their car doors slam, the loud farewells, the final blasts of the party horns and noisemakers.

That afternoon Jack and I carried the drawer with the cozy nest outside, turned the drawer upside down and watched a large, sleepy field mouse surface, blinking in the sun. “Dafuq?” it mumbled, staring bleary-eyed at us before racing into to the woods.

I’m not proud of this, but at that moment, if I’d had a saxophone, I’d have played it in triumph. But Jack and I then carried the sheet nest over to the rock whence the mouse had fled and left it as a peace offering. Sleep and let sleep.