Jeff Deck '02 is best described as a "grammar vigilante." Deck, armed with his "typo correction kit" -- which consists of permanent and dry-erase markers, several types of Wite-Out, chalk, pens and crayons -- set off on an odyssey of typographical nit-picking to rectify grammatical injustices about one month ago.
"We're basically going around the country finding spelling and grammatical errors and attempting to fix them," Deck said. "Some of the things we find we'll just fix on our own, but we find someone if we can and see if we can get their permission to fix it."
Along the way, Deck and his various accomplices -- collectively known as the Typo Elimination Advancement League -- have recorded their adventures on the group's web site. The site conveniently displays a hand-drawn map of the United States, with the group's travel route represented by a series of connected dots that most recently stopped in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Each town has a blog entry with photos of comically inappropriate signs, and, if the group was successful, their subsequent corrections.
Deck, who says he has always had a "knack for spelling," honed his skills as a former Opinion Editor and humor columnist for The Dartmouth, and as an editor for an academic publishing house in Washington, D.C.
"About a year ago, I realized that I had never quite shaken my editor's habits -- I had internalized the Chicago Manual of Style," Deck said. "I realized I still had it with me, as well as my typo-spotting eye...and thought it would be a good thing to go around raising awareness."
On his extensive road trip, Deck has been accompanied by an interesting cast of characters, including Ben Herson '02. Herson, who traveled with Deck from Maryland to Los Angeles, is a "hypercritical reader and semicolon enthusiast," according to the group's web site.
In San Diego, Deck picked up Josh Roberts, who, according to the site has been a "tireless defender of the virtues of correctness and justice all of his adult life, a good portion of his adolescent life, and even a few days here and there during prepubescence." Roberts will travel with the group along the West coast.
In Seattle, Roberts will be replaced by Deck's girlfriend, Jane Connolly, who, according to the site, "saved her high school principal's life in the cafeteria [when he was]... about to consume the contents of a jar marked 'POISSON.'"
Over the course of the expedition, the group has encountered typos big and small, sometimes risking personal safety to correct grammatical mishaps. Once, when traveling through the Southwest, they spotted an improper apostrophe in the word "camera's." Deck and Herson "scaled some barbed wire and dodged some cacti" to erase the mistake, Deck said.
"It was physically the biggest typo we saw on the trip," Deck said. "The apostrophe was about the size of my head."
Another incident occurred when the two spotted a restaurant soliciting "waitres" in Fort Stockton, Texas. According to Deck, the mistake was on a sign that was too high to reach, so Herson had to climb on top of their car to correct the error.
"It involved a bit of derring-do, which I always support," Deck said.
Deck's journey will conclude when he arrives home in Massachusetts, at which point he will return to his apartment and "feel complete," he said.
In the end, though, the encounters with "grocerry stores, US hellicopter helmets, homemade deserts and pregnacy tests" have opened the public's eyes to the problem of grammatical incorrectness, Deck said.
"It really speaks to the fact that if you make something interesting and fun, people can get excited about it, and it can be constructive," he said.
