"Dont Eving Thank Off It" sign in New Orleans. (Image by Karen Apricot.)

Jeff Deck is a college grad in his 20s who drove around America in search of typos on public signage. When he found particularly egregious errors, he would use markers and correction fluid to fix mistakes or he would confront the mistaken. Deck was arrested only once and somehow wasn’t repeatedly punched in the face. He did, however, open a Pandora’s box about teaching, race, class, the Internet and the ever-changing English language. Salon’s Thomas Rogers interviewed Deck about his spellchecking sojourn and The Great Typo Hunt, a book about the experience that he co-authored with Benjamin Herson. An excerpt from the Salon Q&A:

“Salon: Spelling mistakes are a big part of the way the English language has evolved–and been so successful on the global stage. Aren’t you also holding back language?

Jeff Deck: We came under criticism from people at two different ends of the language philosophy spectrum. In our book we refer to it as the hawk versus hippie dilemma. You have grammar hawks who are ready to jump on anything that has the risk of being non-standard and call it a mistake, and, on the other hand, you have descriptivists who basically have a free-for-all approach. At its most extreme, descriptivism argues that most of these typos aren’t mistakes, it’s language change in motion. We tried to strike a middle ground and say, OK, we’re going to recognize that English is a constantly evolving organism and that the spellings of some things are going to change over time. I’m not going to go around to every instance of the word ‘donut’ and add in the ‘ugh.’

On the other hand, if you look at certain errors on an individual level, where someone accidentally throws a ‘V’ into the word ‘entertainment,’ like we saw on one sign in Atlanta, or a sign we saw in Vegas that offered ‘horsebacking riding’ instead of ‘horseback riding,’ these are not pieces of evidence of some growing consensus; these are just individual errors. They’re something that I think you can in pretty good faith go after.”