Haunted By Typos
There is much written today about great being the enemy of good, not being afraid to make mistakes, taking imperfect action, and learning to love the F-word (Failure).
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but today I found a typo!
Now, when it’s someone else’s typo, that’s fine. Who doesn’t love reading a restaurant menu and finding a typo or two, or three? There was a short-lived pancake house by us whose menu had close to a dozen typos. Eggs Bennedict. Rueben. Omelette’s – no, wait – Omeletes! It was a draw for me, but may have foreshadowed their demise.
My Grandpa, or More Dad as we called him, would sit in his favorite chair and read with a pencil in his hand. He would read newspapers, magazines, books, manuals, and he would underline things he liked and he would circle typos. Sometimes out loud. Finding a typo in Newsweek was a BIG win, back in the day. I followed in his footsteps. There’s not much I enjoy more than catching typos in a 2,000 page grant application potentially worth $70M before it is submitted to the NIH.
The first newsletter I created was in 6th grade and it was free of typos. Great start. A friend and I launched an underground newspaper in high school and we made sure it was clean. But for a college PR class I created another newsletter and there it was, circled in bright red ink: rappoire instead of rapport. OMG. Was it a French newsletter? Non. Does it still haunt me? Oui.
In my first full time job at the University of Detroit my Library Media Center team created and desktop published a cute little 8.5x11 single-fold “news-in-a-letter.” The front page story had text wrapped perfectly around the first compact disc in our new collection by Aretha Franklin, no less. We had hundreds of copies printed. We handed them out to hundreds of people before some jerk pointed out the typo: formally instead of formerly. I stared at the ceiling all night for a week.
Driving up north in Michigan a few years ago I noticed that the county replaced their street signs with bigger, brighter ones. Nice. Then I saw they replaced DEADSTREAM RD. with DEADSREAM RD. I pulled over and inserted the T with a caret and a sharp screwdriver.
Sorry, not sorry. Can’t turn it off. Don’t want to.
