Excerpted from The Right Coast
Free the Typo 2!: Typo Vigilantes Treated Harshly
Gail Heriot
Typo1_3 Well ... the the Typo 2 haven't actually been imprisoned, but if they had been, I'd be out there marching in the streets ... maybe anyway. Instead, they've been convicted of vandalism, sentenced to one year's probation, banned from national parks and ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $3035. The comments to the news stories are going heavily against them, but to this somewhat school marmish law professor, they are heroes. Like Zorro. Only with editing pencils. Didn't Zorro break a few laws too?
Who are these masked men? They are self-styled "typo vigilantes," who had been traveling the country correcting public signs with spelling and punctuation errors--until they were arrested for correcting a sign that the National Park Service regards as a work of art.
According to the Park Service, the sign was painted "more than 60 years ago by artist Mary Colter." Mary Colter was actually an architect and interior designer; she designed the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon, which is where the incident occurred. Alas, although she is described in her Wikipedia entry as a "chain-smoking perfectionist," she evidently did not attain perfection in her spelling or punctuation--at least not on this occasion. My heroes at the Typo Eradication Advancement League found fault with her use of apostrophes and commas, so they fixed them. They weren't too keen on her use of "emense" either, which I could find no trace of in my OED, but they left it uncorrected.((END EXCERPT))
Their crimes appeal to my smartass nature.
