In Memoriam: Typos
Call me crazy, but I love a typo. A misprint is even better. Once in a blue moon I’ll stumble across an old book in which whole pages of text are slightly askew, as if someone didn’t line up the printer quite right, and it’ll be the best thing that happened to me all week. Because I like when you can see the human mind at work. When you know a writer and/or editor read this page a thousand times and still managed to miss that “one” was misspelled as “once.” A typo is like a behind-the-scenes scoop, which, as a reader, I love.
What I do not love is rampant grammatical errors or gross editorial oversight. In those cases, I’m enraged and ashamed of the publishing industry. One or two typos in a piece is acceptable and frankly charming, but a whole host of them is just embarrassing. It’s a very fine line that I draw nonetheless.
Sometimes, when I read through previous blog posts of mine, I find mistakes that I’m itching to fix so I don’t look like a dummy who can’t use a comma. Thirty percent of the time I fix it. The other seventy percent I stop myself from correcting the record. Because, yeah, sometimes I am a dummy who can’t use a comma. So what? If I can’t reveal my shortcomings on my own personal blog, I can’t reveal them anywhere.
Not to mention, typos can be hilarious. The fact that you can now edit your texts after sending them on iMessage is depriving people everywhere of stupid inside jokes and merciless teasing from their friends. My name used to autocorrect to “She’s” (sometimes it still does) and my friends in high school began referring to me as “She’s Humphries” in public. Now that’s comedy.
The impact of typos on society is miniscule. In the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing at all. They may soon disappear completely, another bug ironed out by the rapid optimization of modern technology. Spellcheck was strike one, and AI was strike two and three. Feed a piece of writing to ChatGBT and it pops out the other end squeaky clean. Typos eradicated. There’s no real harm in that. AI was precisely created for such administrative tasks.
I started thinking about the death of typos when I coincidently encountered a string of working writers discussing how they incorporate AI. From Cory Doctorow (the author of Enshittification) on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, to Derek Thompson (a contributing writer for The Atlantic) on his own podcast, to some personal acquaintances of mine, they have all mentioned using AI as a proofreader. That final stop before sending a piece of writing into the world. The last pair of eyes.
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with this. It is about as benign as AI usage can be. Of all the things AI has and will take from humans, typos are barely worth mourning.
But still, we are losing something. The Purdue OWL MLA guide. Calling your English-teacher mother and asking her where the apostrophe goes. The entry-level jobs where twenty-two-years-olds learn to do grunt work. Making innocent mistakes because that’s what humans do. Letting history stand corrected. “She’s Humphries.”
When I find a typo in a book or article, for a second, I feel like the distance between me and the author evaporates. I am reminded that this is a human earnestly writing words on a page, trying to communicate with me, another human. They are fallible, like I am fallible.
I have no shame in being AI’s #1 enemy. Every chance I get, I curse its existence. I do not remotely care if that makes me a professional hazard or a luddite or just annoying. I don’t care if I’m being nitpicky or melodramatic about the death of typos. This sudden obsession with perfection is startling to me. Why are we so afraid of showing our shortcomings? What ever happened to learning from our mistakes?
One of my earliest memories of writing is when I was seven or eight, sitting at the one computer in our house, painstakingly typing out a story I’d based on the most recent season of Dancing with the Stars. When I finished, my mother kneeled down next to me and read through the whole thing, correcting my grammar as she went. She told me, “‘Kinda’ is not a word. It’s ‘kind of.’” And she fixed every single one of my apostrophes.