11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Travel and Grammar Fun, August 16, 2010
This review is from: The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time (Hardcover)
The Great Typo Hunt is a fantastic read that honestly had me laughing out loud at times (usually on a crowded bus or train). It's a road trip story of two friends who have a crazy idea: drive around the country correcting typos. Their adventures and the typos they find along the way not only make you laugh but also make you want to cry at what some of these mistakes say about the American population. They found over 400 typos on their trip and learned a lot about society along the way. A part that really resonated with me was when they discussed people's innate fear of looking stupid. Many people along the way would rather leave the sign incorrect then admit that they had made an error. They discussed how people sometimes limit their written vocabulary in an attempt to hide their lack of understanding about spelling and grammar. As a young child I remember being told that I could never be smart because I was a bad speller. An even now, as an adult with an BA from an Ivy league institution and an MBA from one of the top business schools in the country, I still find myself dumbing down emails, texts, Facebook posts, and even book review posts in an attempt to hide my inability to spell. That section not only shook me to the core but made me realize that I was not alone. Trust me, something about this book will resonate with you. And if nothing else, you will certainly understand proper apostrophe usage and you will become aware of the immense amount of typos that exist in the written text you pass by every day. If you like travel, adventure, or even grammar, this book is a great read and will have you discussing it with friends for days.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great American Quest, September 14, 2010
This review is from: The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time (Hardcover)
For me, it's the plural with an unnecessary apostrophe. The sign at the grocery says: "Apple's." I notice the mistake, sigh, and pass by. Not Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson, though. They are the founding members of TEAL, the Typo Eradication Advancement League, helpful strangers (call them "grammar vigilantes" at your peril) who wander into town, spot the signs with misspellings or bad punctuation, and make corrections. They did this as a mission throughout our land, traveling from one coast to another with their trusty Wite-Out, chalk, pens, crayons, and dry-erase markers of every hue. Sometimes the strangers got a thank you for their helpful corrections. Sometimes they got scorn. And one set of corrections was made into a federal case against them. The rousing, funny, and instructive story is told in _The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time_ (Crown Publishers), written in Deck's first person but with both credited as authors. In 2007, a college reunion got Deck to thinking about what he had accomplished in his life. He had just returned from his five-year reunion at Dartmouth College, embarrassed by his lack of post-graduate accomplishment; he had been an editor, and an administrative assistant for an office that studied climate change, but he wasn't having much effect on the world. And then, walking outside his apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, he got a sign: "PRIVATE PROPERTY - NO TRESSPASSING" it said. He'd seen it before, but that extra S hadn't bothered him so much. "What if I were to step forward and do something?" he asked himself.
The answer: "Typo hunting was the good that I, Jeff Deck, was uniquely suited to visit upon society." (The mock heroic language breaks in frequently, emphasizing and at the same time deprecating the quest.) Initially, they made some "stealth corrections," changes on signs made without permission. During the quest, however, they realized that this was not a fair way to make a change nor to educate; the TEAL position is that changes can be made only after asking permission. It doesn't always work. In a restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, "Gorganzola" was listed on a chalkboard menu, a small error that would have been easily repaired by simply rubbing out the little tail on the "a" to make it an "o." But they get a response that is literally, "So who says it is wrong?... Why should I fix it? Because you say so?" The manager does not accept the need for a change, and says with sarcasm in farewell, "We'll be _sure_ to take care of that for you." Often, however, the correctees were agreeable and even appreciative. "All I had to do was ask," Deck declares of many of his encounters. In a tourist trap in Arizona, they can't do anything about a typo in a neon sign ("I didn't have any spare glass tubing handy for the rechanneling of inert gases"), but a sign in the window of the restaurant offered "stawbery," "lemonaide," and decafinated coffee." The server at the restaurant was grateful that the boys were going to fix the sign themselves, but had to be reassured that she would not be charged for the service. A shoe store sign said that it was "Now in it's 16th year," and it had said that for so long that the dry-erase marker had become unerasable. The boys are delighted when the employee to whom they showed the correction borrows a marker from their Typo Correction Kit, and turns the offending apostrophe into a little star, and makes other little stars around the sign. "Dude," said Herson, "that was freaking amazing." In New Orleans, a blackboard outside a restaurant mentioned "Thrusday" and the employee to whom they showed it was amused, as was the one who chalked the error, as were other employees. They were amused, too, to learn of the mission of TEAL, and not only did they have a good laugh about it all, they gave the boys a prize for pointing out the mistake, a bumper sticker that said "Time flies when you're having rum."
The authors succeeded in being polite in all their exchanges; this may be because of a self-effacing attitude that charmingly shows up in Deck's episodic doubts of the value of his mission. The big issues take the book out of the category of picaresque lark. What if English is always changing and there are no pure forms? Should grammarians be interested in legislating what forms are good or bad, or should they be content with describing how people are using English to get their points across? Questions of how we learn and how we communicate get taken in stride. When Deck gets to wondering not only what difference does a little apostrophe out of place make, but what difference can TEAL make in the larger picture of good grammar and a better-organized cosmos, Herson reassures him that a typo mistake "... is a controllable thing that reflects on the store..." That, and good punctuation means clearer communication, and while an apostrophe out of place might not even be noticed by the majority of viewers, it cannot help in a sign's effort to get communication across. The costly federal case against the crusaders does not dismay them, and after a legally-enforced year of hibernation, they are back at work, and enlisting others to help. They have learned that typos can be found in every section of the country, in all socioeconomic levels; there is no real pattern: "Everyone can use an editor," they say. There is a pattern of errors, though, with that unnecessary apostrophe being the most frequent, followed by the necessary apostrophe which has been omitted, followed by the classic confusion of "its" and "it's." You will come away from this book with a better understanding of the errors, and perhaps less of a tendency to make them yourself. There is little judgmentalism here, and just a little didacticism, and a great deal of mirth along the road. It's a trip worth taking.
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