I have long entertained a fantasy of creeping around the West End and Lehigh Valley area in full ninja gear, armed with a can of spray paint, to fix the massive amounts of misspelled signs. Someone should tell Burger King that “chili,” is spelled with only one L, Wendy’s that “Caesar” is not spelled, “Cesar”, Shoprite that “vinager” is actually spelled vinegar, and the auto parts place that “clearance” only has two E’s. My friends even got me a shirt, proclaiming me, “La Grande Reductora”—The Grand Editor.
Apparently, I’m not the only person who feels this way. Two friends from college, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, formed something called “TEAL,” or the “Typo Eradication Advancement League.” They may not dress in black and work their grammatical magic after dark, but they do offer their services, free of charge, to businesses around the country, using spray paint, white-out, and black electrical tape to correct potentially embarrassing typos.
Of course, not everyone appreciates their hard, pro-bono work. TEAL got in some serious trouble a while back when they corrected a sign in the Grand Canyon by painting over an extra apostrophe. Since TEAL documented all of their corrections on their websites, it wasn’t hard for the federal government to track them down, arrest them for defacing federal property, and fine them several thousand dollars. (The government also replaced the “defaced” sign, including the erroneous apostrophe. Your tax dollars at work, folks.)
After that injustice, TEAL seems to have gone underground; their website has been stripped, and all you find in a web search are reports on their past heroics.
If I can find them, I might just “sign” up.
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