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Posted on 08/23/2008 9:57:59 AM PDT by Terriergal
PHOENIX —
When it comes to marking up historic signs, good grammar is a bad defense. Two self-styled vigilantes against typos who defaced a more than 60-year-old, hand-painted sign at Grand Canyon National Park were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year.
Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty Aug. 11 for the damage done March 28 at the park's Desert View Watchtower. The sign was made by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who designed the rustic 1930s watchtower and other Grand Canyon-area landmarks.
Deck and Herson, both 28, toured the United States this spring, wiping out errors on government and private signs. They were interviewed by NPR and the Chicago Tribune, which called them "a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
So... are they going to "fix" the signs back to the crummy condition they were in before? or are they going to replace them with the corrections? And why did they get put up with errors in the first place?
Close enough for government work I guess.
The sign was made by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who designed the rustic 1930s watchtower
So was the sign made in the 1930s along with the tower itself or was it made in the late 1940s?
And since it was handpainted, it was not a government error nor something they should have altered.
Go up to a picasso painting in a museum and "fix" the anatomy, see where that gets you.
You know what? Sometimes what a person has to say is more important than any tyyyyypo's or incorrect usage.
There I made a typo. Is your hair on fire?
I have no sympathy for them. None.
Authorities said a diary written by Deck reported that while visiting the watchtower, he and Herson "discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, contained a few errors."
The fiberboard sign has yellow lettering with a black background. Deck wrote that they used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with white-out and added a comma.
The misspelled word "emense" was not fixed, Deck wrote, because "I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further. ... Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight."
This sign was hand-painted by Mary Colter. She designed most of the older buildings at Grand Canyon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Colter
It was’nt their sign to correct.
This is hugh! Series!
uIf I make errors, even if I see them before posting, I don’t fix them.
If you don’t like it tough!!!!
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I imagine putting Prince Grammar in prison for awhile would at least give him something else to “be haunted by that perversity” at night.
On second thought, from now on i’ll make a lot of intentional ones just to tick uou off!!!!
what was the misspelling?
was it correct for the time?
It is the classic example of the “no life” no-it-alls who just can’t let an innocent type go.
Yes it was mispelled, yes it was old.
What next, go through and correct all the old writing on colonial documents from 200 years ago?
(wasn’t dog once spelled “dorg”?)
Here is a link that shows the actual sign:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=522
I think it is telling that no one noticed for a month or more.
These idiots would never have been caught if they had not posted a web site about their crime and boasted about it.
Most criminals are caught because they cannot keep their mouth shut.
Let them figure out how to correct THAT.
bump
You rang?
In your sentence, "typo's" should not be spelled with an apostrophe.
No. They will leave it as it is and then they will fill in and polish down the crack in the Liberty Bell to make the bell look as if it was never damaged. < /sarc>
The sign was 60 years old and hand-painted by the original architect of the Grand Canyon architectural monuments. It was not perfect for the Grammar Police but it was original History as it was created by the historical figure.
It no longer is.
A original historical artifact is an original historical artifact, warts and all.
I don't consider myself an elitist, but I am disgusted at the inferior “product” of the American public school system nowadays. I graduated from a public high school in 1976, back when people were taught how to spell.
A little research discloses that this was a premeditated crime!
"For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew are traversing America in order to edit it. Jeff Deck, and his friends at the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal), are spending three months driving from San Francisco, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts, on a mission to correct every misspelled, poorly punctuated, sloppily phrased item of signage they encounter en route. Equipped with marker pens, stickers and white-out, they are seeking to scourge America's landscape of floating apostrophes, logic-defying syntax and other manifestations of laziness and/or illiteracy."
i also find it interesting that the article describing the crime is replete with its own errors:
"Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, Mass., and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff after damaging a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a year's probation, during which they cannot enter any national park, and were ordered to pay restitution."The defaced sign was not "rare." The usage of that word implies that there are more, identical signs saying the same thing but that they exist only in a limited production. The word the author should have used is "unique," establishing the fact that there is only one such sign. Perhaps these miscreants should have been sentenced to tracking down every copy of the newspaper with that mis-used word and correcting it by hand with their "erasers" and "marking pens."
(The author of this FreeRepublic reply always attempts to include something in his comments for everyone. He is also aware that some people compulsively need to seek out errors; so, In recognition of these facts, he has thoughtfully included some.)
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