Sunday, August 24, 2008

The Bookman has been in Hawaii this past week attending a wedding and he was greatly taken with the following headline in The Honolulu Advertiser this morning:

GRAMMAR VIGILANTES BANNED FROM NATIONAL PARKS
Typo fixers get probation for damaging rare sign

Associated Press
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. They had removed an extraneous apostrophe and added a comma to the sign.

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 (pic left) 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 National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune, which called them "a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation."
Read the full piece at the Honolulu Advertiser online.

Good on them The Bookman says!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good grammar is essential for clarity of communication; defacing historic signage is unconscionable. The logical approach would be to have a system whereby these grammatical errors could be corrected with an attached addendum so that those reading the sign would also have a lesson in grammar...everyone wins!

Anonymous said...

They are saints. I hope they inspire a movement. I've got my whiteout and marker pen at the ready to start up a New Zealand chapter.