Committing random acts of correction…
Jeff Deck, three friends, and band of recruits– The Typo Eradication Advancement League— are on a quest:
This March through May, we, sworn members of TEAL, will be taking a road trip around the country to stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language. We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.
And viola! Signs like this:
…become, with the help of tools like a white marker, signs like this:
As we luxuriate in our lexicons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1588 that the 130 ships (and 30,000 men) of the Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon, headed for the English Channel in support of a planned invasion of the Sceptred Isle; it took three full days for the fleet to leave the harbor… But while the Spanish force– known also as Grande y Felicísima Armada “Great and Most Fortunate Navy” or Armada Invencible, “Invincible Navy”– made it to the targeted destination, their plans didn’t pan out. In the Channel, they met the British naval forces commanded by Lord Howard and Francis Drake, at whose hands they suffered a costly defeat. Sailing home around Scotland and Ireland, the diminished Spanish force ran into terrible weather, and lost more ships and sailors to wreckage. In the end, only 67 ships and 10,000 men made it back to Spain… and the undeclared war between Spain and England was at an end.
