Doing it for the kids

This story hit the wire a few days ago, which in web time makes it ancient history, but given its nature I feel some compulsion to mention it.

Why? It pertains to noticing grammatical mistakes, a topic on which I have commented more than once.

Two men, who were apparently in a group known as the Typo Eradication Advancement League, noticed mistakes on a sign in the Grand Canyon National Park, so they made corrections to said sign with markers and correction fluid. However, the sign was historic, dating back to before the second World War.

They were tracked down by investigators for the National Parks Service because they admitted to doing it on their website (which essentially has been taken down).

They pleaded guilty to vandalism charges, were banned from visiting national parks for a year, and required to pay over $3000 to restore the sign to its previous grammatical imperfection.

What lesson is there to be learned here?

That if one is to write on signs in a national park, even with the preservation of English in mind, one should not mention that in a public forum such as a website? No. In this day, if one doesn't tout one's actions on a site that can come up in a Google search, it didn't really happen.

That one should leave the signs as is and wryly lament it on one's website? Well, that's kind of my thing, and we've seen how well it's working to address the issue. However, it's not so much that I disagree completely with the notion of taking action, but as I don't have a few thousand extra bucks sitting around (especially with a wedding coming up next year), I can't afford any more than what I've been doing. So if one has the bank account to back it up, that (in and of itself) is not what should hold one back.

When one sees a typo or other error in a public sign, one must research its origin to determine the period in which it was composed. One must bear in mind that language rules continue to adapt, thus what is considered incorrect in present day could very well have been perfectly acceptable in its day.

Even if one determines that the error was considered incorrect in its historical context, one needs to bear in mind the implicit rule when it comes to such matters: One must be of the same generation as the person who made the mistake in order to propose any corrections. After multiple generations have come and gone, the sign becomes an historic record of how quaintly unconcerned our forebears could be regarding this arbitrary sense of order those of us who bothered to learn it tend to be.

The signs need to be left alone so future generations of English majors can discover them and be filled with their own sense of indignation. Really, what will children in the future (who take the time to spell check) have to complain about unless we leave the mistake-ridden old world as is?