Inside the ‘2008 Typo Hunt Across America’

My first thought about this cross-country “outreach mission of the Typo Eradication Advancement League”: Brilliant idea. Second thought: “Hunt” might be too strong of a word, since any traveler with an eye for typos knows, they’re in plain sight everywhere. Of course, since project founder, Jeff Deck, and his fellow typo-seeking travelers began their road trip last month, they’ve chronicled hundreds of typos. They’ve also corrected many of them because, as the project manifesto states, “only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.”

The manifesto makes clear, though, that it’s not about making people look stupid or feel bad.

We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed.

The hunt has reached the West Coast—and national TV news. ABC profiled Deck yesterday, following him around Hollywood as he used his Wite-Out, crayons and markers to add apostrophes and hyphens to typo-riddled signage.

From Los Angeles, Deck and company will head up the coast “to stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language.”

Good luck, members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League. If for some reason you ever need some tips on where to go to find some typos to correct, I’m sure the members of the Flickr groups “Quotation Mark” Abuse and Atrocious Apostrophe’s can help out.

Related on World Hum:
* Promised Land Closed
* Signs of Confusion

Photo by cloudsoup, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

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