Thursday, June 11, 2020

At first, I don’t notice who the person walking past me is. I do notice immediately that a word on his t-shirt is misspelled. I don’t catch what the word or the error are, though I do know that it was toward the end of the top word on a stack of three lines of text. A few minutes later, he comes past me again. The word is “Manhatten”, spelled with an “e”. I tell him. “That’s intentional. I wear a shirt with a misspelled word so people spot it and feel smart.” I’m dubious. I tell him that I notice things like that. I can tell that there’s a problem with spelling or punctuation before I consciously register what it is. “That’s your Old City kicking in.” I don’t know what he means. A few minutes later, I realize that he said “OCD.” My ears don’t debug text as quickly as my eyes. Much of my job is fixing other people’s English. It’s hard to convince them of some things. Adjectives in English sound wrong when they’re out of order. English does weird things with singulars and plurals: We say “book store” not “books store.” Sometimes the people fix what they write. Sometimes they don’t. I do what I can.