Tell Your Typo Eradication Adventure Here

Over at Mighty Red Pen, where MRP linked to her newspaper's version of this story about the Typo Eradication Advancement League vigilantes who've been zinged for defacing a permanent sign in a national park (not just a sign--a national historic monument of a sign), a couple of us were defending the practice of writing on vending-machine signs or even bad graffitti.

Why defending it? Well, bcs we'd done it, now and then.

Tell YOUR typo eradication story--what signs have you corrected?

Here's mine!

Years ago I worked on lower Fifth Avenue, and spent a lot of time waiting for the R train at 23rd Street to go uptown (and home). Subways ran slower then.

There was a spelling error (something like a missing "m" in "accommodate") in one of the posters on the platform that I stared at for weeks on end.

Several months later, at a party w/ friends, someone said, "Hey, I was in your subway stop yesterday!" What stop, and how'd you know if was *my* stop? I asked. "Because you fixed a typo on an ad."

He'd seen the fix on the poster, carefully indicated with proofreader's marks, and thought of me immediately ("Toots should see this correction. She'd laugh."). Then he'd walked over to the NEXT poster, which had a drawing of the map of the U.S., w/ state borders sketched in. And had seen a little star in southern Iowa, w/ the name of my hometown written next to it.

He figured, there weren't 2 people from my 1,300-population "city" in NYC. It had to be me.

BUSTED!

(Oh, and I did actually fix an apostrophe on graffitti in the tunnel under the 42nd St. A-train station, once. And I checked carefully for cops, or even witnesses, before I did it.)

So, tell your story about what you've fixed--and where would you draw the line?