Typo Mortification

You’d feel the same way if the king found out about that typo.

Typos are mortifying. How can anyone live them down? I particularly detest the abuse of apostrophes. I almost want to open a home for abused and neglected apostrophes, I cringe so much when I see them. In international communication, what counts as a typo? What’s the sort of thing you can reasonably shake your head about?

Yet, I, a native speaker, am guilty of typos as much as anyone. I forget what word I was typing recently, but I somehow managed to combine the one word with the next word I was supposed to type, but I typed the rest of the next word just fine – though without its beginning. That was stuck on the end of the first word and the end of the first word was lost forever, dropped into a void in time and space. Or I might find it the next time I dust my keyboard.

I also have a strange enthusiasm for mixing up the letters T and D. Phonetically, they are identical except for the voicing. The mouth may be imprecise, but that sort of thing is not allowed in writing. A single letter may do the work of all the allophones in a phoneme, where your brain works with your ears and straightens out everything that’s coming in so that you can make sense of it. Your ears have help, the letters T and D do not.

I am lazy. I don’t like checking everything over. I want to just send and forget it. Of course I’m embarrassed when I spelled “shoes” again as “shows” or I find the place in which I started one sentence with one thought but decided to do the same idea in a totally new sort of sentence but didn’t delete what I had written of the old sentence. I get tired. I get distracted. All the usual human shortcomings.

What, then, makes for inexcusable typos?

There is such a thing as a reasonably enforceable standard of English. We wouldn’t be able to share internet communication without it. Irish, English, Scottish, South African, Australian, New Zealand, and all the varieties of North American English (leaving aside all the places English is a long-running official language of government, business, and education) would get to be mutually unintelligible without at least overlapping standards.

In African English and Indian English, you begin to see extreme variation from standardized English as it is adapted to local pronunciation or the evolved grammar of use as a trade language. Then you have all the non-native writers in English who communicate effectively but make regular errors in spelling or grammar. Social media allows for lower standards, but formal publishing still has particular standards, even for e-book only publications.

Let’s bring this to a point. This is a blog, so the formality of the grammar will be lower. Good enough. Still, I should check for typos because this, being part of a writing portfolio, is part of my professional presence on the internet. (My, how very self-referential we are getting!) Social media has higher tolerances because it’s sent once, perhaps forgotten within minutes. Unless you are a future political candidate and you posted something that can be profitably misinterpreted, you’re probably fine. There are even somewhat standardized contractions of words to fit a thing into whatever the Twitter limit is these days.

Standardized English is a very important thing, and it has become the common property of the whole world. Native speakers will always have an edge, but that’s not the end of the story. Go out and get effective writing done, try to avoid typos, edit them when you can, and keep writing!