Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Join as a sustainer and help unlock $10k. Just 24 sustainers to go!

Man Travels Country to Fixe Typo's

What's wrong with this picture?
Tricia McKinney
/
NPR
What's wrong with this picture?

Jeff Deck of Boston had seen a lot of misspellings on signs around his city, and one day he decided he just couldn't take it anymore.

Deck cobbled together the Typo Eradication Advancement League and set off on a nationwide quest to repair the mistakes by any means necessary, including chalk and adhesive letters. For the next three months, the four team members will travel highways and byways wielding the red pen of justice and blogging their exploits.

Typos have been a passion of Deck's since he won a few spelling bees in junior high school. As TEAL makes its way around America, Deck expects to find endless examples of the lowly apostrophe being misused. "It seems that a lot of errors revolve around the apostrophe, that eternally misunderstood punctuation mark," he says.

Deck even found a misspelling on his doctor's business cards — which read "referal" instead of "referral." He mentioned it to the clerk, saying, "There's no way this is going to get fixed, is there?" And indeed, there was not.

Seen any good typo's lately?

Share your best on the BPP blog.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

You make NHPR possible.

NHPR is nonprofit and independent. We rely on readers like you to support the local, national, and international coverage on this website. Your support makes this news available to everyone.

Give today. A monthly donation of $5 makes a real difference.