Charlottesville: Not a Typo

by Benjamin D. Herson

Prior to our (“Great Typo Hunt”) event in Charlottesville, I decided to send out a little tweet.  (Yes, I have recently become yet another twit.)  Unfortunately, I’d botched something.  The red squiggles indicated I’d misspelled the word Charlottesville.  I stared at it for a moment.  Before I could even start adding or deleting letters–the way you do when you get those squiggles and figure you must have just gotten this or that little thing wrong so you change it to see if the squiggles go away–I realized that I didn’t even know what to change.  So I asked the human spell-checker, also known as Jeff Deck, the founder of TEAL, to spell the city we were currently in.  He spelled it and it checked out.  TweetDeck simply didn’t recognize it, hadn’t listed it in their lexicon of proper nouns.  It bothered me that I’d actually stared at it wondering what I’d gotten wrong, that the fact that I couldn’t even guess what to change hadn’t made me shout back at the screen, “I defy you, villain!  I know better!”

Onwards to the event, which was at New Dominion in the downtown area, and what a blast it was.  The event space was up overlooking the rest of the store at the back, with all sorts of interesting artwork on the walls.  Not having as many contacts here, we weren’t sure what to expect, but people began trickling in about fifteen minutes before the event began.  We asked some of them how they had heard about the event, and every person or group seemed to have a different answer.   Nice work getting the word out, Charlottesville.

Read the full article on The Great Typo Hunt

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*