My final visit to a local supermarket, before adopting the lazier and more convenient online ordering and delivery technique now available even to those with extremely rural post-codes, resulted in a quest to count the typos. Spurred on by ‘this week’s seclection’ and myriad ‘special offer’s’ I totted up more than 80 individual blunders before heading for the ‘six items or less’ (six items or fewer, surely) check-out and returning to my car, which was situated next to a notice requesting that shoppers should ‘please return you’re trolleys here’.
Continually dispirited by the increase in typos appearing in signs and displays, it cheered my morning to read the tale of two friends who were so incensed by the grammatical errors appearing publicly all over America that they decided to embark on their own corrective measures. I would dearly love to find the time and temerity to trawl the UK with the intention of repairing every blunder seen but Jeff Deck and Benjamin D Herson managed it; they joined forces and spent more than two months locating and amending 437 typos.
Deck and Herson are to be congratulated for their crusade, which started with the former’s irritation when viewing a sign which announced ‘no tresspassing’. This error must be particularly common; I found exactly the same mis-spelling when wandering round downtown Miami earlier this year. The cause of much mirth, I had to dig out a camera and record this display for posterity.
Entertaining these blunders might be but, on a more serious note, why is an ever-increasing number of howlers managing to slip through the spell-checker to appear on finished displays? Back when I was at school we were taught the fundamentals of grammar and how to employ a dictionary to spell those words with which we were unfamiliar. Today the approach is even easier as Google and other online options will normally provide the answer if there is no printed version of the Shorter Oxford, Collins or Chambers within reach.
Despite the simplicity involved in checking text or grammar, typos are increasing whether these are misspellings, misplaced apostrophes or worse. Possibly only the true pedant will cringe at spotting a split infinitive. Nor can we expect a deep understanding of hysteron proteron to permeate the minds of the creators of words on signs. But, surely, some common-sense syntax wouldn’t go amiss? ‘Do not use lift in case of fire’ is a classic which appears in hotels and offices around the world, including the UK. ‘Dead slow children’ appears on signs alongside play areas. We all seem to accept these instructions now, automatically reassembling the words into their correct order to understand their message. More alarmingly, perhaps, is the upsurge in misspellings that blights our daily lives. During a televised political broadcast on behalf of the UK party which didn’t return to power this time, a statement proclaimed ‘eductional maintenance allowance has helped 2.8m teenagers’. And, all over the country, there are pubs and boarding houses offering ‘accomodation’, many with ‘on suite’ facilities. There are so many examples, I could write a book about them – but our intrepid American duo has beaten me to it.
Messrs Deck and Herson’s exploits in cleaning up American typographic errors are recorded, in detail, in the ‘The Great Typo Hunt: Two friends changing the world, one correction at a time’. It’s available on Amazon, in printed and e-reader versions, and published by Harmony (ISBN-10: 0307591077 and ISBN-13: 978-0307591074). This book should be of interest to anyone involved in creating and producing signs and displays, or who is eager to join the crusade of attempting to set to rights our lackadaisical approach to words and spellings. Who knows – those who’ve unwittingly, or uncaringly, fallen into the vast grammatical crevasse might even learn something.
