Bad grammar breeds culture of shortcuts, sloppy language

We found it inside Johnson Space Center, a white sign nearly two feet wide with large, red block letters.

“LINE STARTS HEAR.”

I rolled my eyes. My 10-year-old daughter looked smugly victorious.

“See Mom, you don’t have to spell to be a rocket scientist,” she said, confident she’d found a way out of her spelling homework.

I wished for a marker or red pen to use on the offensive sign but settled instead for a photo of my daughter pointing to the typo and laughing.

Typos usually aren’t a laughing matter in journalism, where accuracy means telling the reader there is there and not their unless it is theirs.

So when I heard about Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, known informally as the “Typo Vigilantes,” I wanted to stand up and yell something articulate and quotable.

Deck and Herson were recently sentenced to probation and banned from all national parks for a year after pleading guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government property.

They copy-edited a sign at Grand Canyon National Park.

With the help of a marker and correction fluid, the vigilantes repaired a comma problem and added an apostrophe on a 60-year-old, hand-painted sign.

Personally, I think authorities arrested the wrong people.

Now I don’t encourage anyone to deface public property, but to me the ones who create signs like the one at the Space Center should be held partially responsible.

Grammar and spelling usage reveals a person’s character and anyone too lazy to make sure what they say makes sense should be banned from being a representative of English-speaking people.

Take text-messages, for example.

Believe it or not, text messaging lingo doesn’t bother me as long as it stays in a text message.

Two semesters ago I sat awestruck as a classmate presented her semester project, worth half her grade. Her speech was well received, but the text-message lingo used on each PowerPoint slide was a grammatical nightmare of exclamatory proportions. The word “to” was replaced with the numeral “2,” “because” was written as “bcuz,” and so on.

She couldn’t understand why her project was graded so low, even after the error was explained, because that’s how she had always communicated.

Mistakes breed mistakes, especially in relation to spelling and grammar. Studies have proven that repeated exposure to a misspelled word increases the likelihood you will spell it incorrectly as well. What you learn as a child in elementary school (which, ironically, used to be referred to as “grammar school”) is the basis for lifelong communication.

I don’t know if whomever made the Space Center sign ever realized their mistake. But as long as there are people like Deck and Herson around, there is hope.