The road and travel are common backdrops in literature.
I never connected with Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” its pace too frenetic and drug-fueled. I could see myself sharing a walk with the narrator of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” but he strikes me as someone who enjoys his me-time.
When I was studying journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, I tried to interview author William Least Heat-Moon, whose “Blue Highways” chronicled his travels on America’s forgotten roads. He thought that the least I could do was to find a way to his book signing in Kansas City even though he lived in Columbia. That was the most I got out of him.
But just because you leave the lights on and drain the car battery once in a while doesn’t mean that you stop driving. For instance, I’d share a ride with Jeff Deck, whose cause is my own.
Deck founded the Typo Eradication Advancement League, a tongue-in-cheek, Wite-Out-in-pocket attempt to fix misspellings, poor punctuation and assorted other ash heaps on the literary landscape.
He even wrote a great book about his cross-country exploits: The Great Typo Hunt.
Deck actively sought to fix the typos that he and his travel companions encountered. In this regard, I’m TEAL with envy. I’m more talk, less action, unless you consider this a positive first step.
I take note of typos in my travels and have catalogued some of my recent finds below. I offer these with malice toward none but rather in the hope that we all might take a second or a third look at what we’ve written before offering it for public consumption.
An apostrophe is a terrible thing to waste, as evidenced by this beautifully screen-printed hat spotted on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Md. Let’s try not to forget the apostrophe’s role in forming contractions. Party on!
While waiting in a too-long ticket line to see the Frederick Keys play host to the Salem Red Sox, I spotted this hanging curveball of a take on “available.” The official scorer has ruled “E” for error.
While returning from a recent trip to Catawissa, Columbia County, I noticed this beauty and had to turn around to take a photo. To quote a line from “The Natural,” “You can’t spell it, but it eats pretty good, don’t it?”
Baseball bat maker Marucci offered a Father’s Day discount of 20 percent during a youth tournament at Cal Ripken’s complex in Aberdeen, Md. I really see no need for Marucci to apologize: It was neither an “inconvience” nor an “inconvenience” to purchase using a credit card.
Finally, the hotel at the Ripken complex featured this man cave, apparently the only retreat that this poor father had in his life. I just walked past it, continuing my quest to find a Dads-only retreat, where finally I might celebrate Father’s Day just with other fathers.
