Connections: Reading and Writing

The New York Times had an eyesore of a typo in a front-page headline recently, and — while it’s not very nice to take pleasure in someone else’s mistakes — I couldn’t help but feel a certain secret satisfaction. If the old reliable Times, with its large and talented staff, can put out an edition with such a glaring mistake (“Panic Were Ebola Risk Is Tiny,” it read, “Stoicism Where It’s Real”), then we at the humble East Hampton Star can ease up a bit. 

The blooper made by The Times, obviously, was to use the word “were,” which made no sense, instead of the intended word, “where.” But at least they got the apostrophe right. 

Like many people who have worked as proofreaders or copy editors, I’ve got an unshakeable habit of reading newspapers and magazines as if I were actually engaged in making corrections with a blue pencil.

Lately, I’ve been on the particular lookout for missing apostrophes. Spell check might work wonders on our spelling, but the English language is just too convoluted for these digitized prose-check nannies — so far, anyway — to be much help with more subtle corrections and suggestions. Spell check can’t always help you decide between “let’s” and “lets,” for example; sometimes, it just doesn’t know if you are trying to say “let us” or if you mean something like “He lets the orange tabby cat eat too much Whiskas.” 

Unfortunately, where apostrophes are concerned, I am also guilty: I leave them out when I am hurrying to send texts on my cellphone. My excuse is that I haven’t found an apostrophe on the little keyboard, but I admit it must surely be there somewhere. In any case, I have plenty of company in getting more lax about apostrophes. We’ve almost come to expect it. I don’t think any diner gets confused when a restaurant menu offers the “chefs choice.”

Is texting making us all more lazy? Or would our language evolve like this, regardless? (The end result, is seems to me, is that the writer seems to increasingly rely on readers to figure out for themselves what is intended, even when what has been printed is wrong.)

Now, let’s consider words that combine the letters “I,” “T,” and “S.” Reading with a critical eye, you will inevitably find “its” and “it’s” mixed up all over the place these days. Everyone with an elementary school education in this country should know that “it’s” is a contraction meaning “it is,” while “its” is a possessive . . . but, judging by the reigning confusion, apparently, most Americans were napping during that class. 

Does all this matter? It does to me.

Obviously, our language is now and has always been in flux, but for me, things today are changing too quickly. I  blame the digital age. Everything is speeding up: News travels from New York to Beijing, documents zing from computer to computer, trades are made on Wall Street in a thousandth of the blink of an eye. Children, even, seem to be putative teenagers before they hit 13. 

Maybe, when it comes to language, I’m succumbing to the conservatism that — in the popular quote attributed, no doubt apocryphally, to Winston Churchill — comes with age. But even so, I still think we should attend carefully to changes in things we hold dear, and the proper use of language is certainly one of those to me.