Armed with Sharpies, erasers and righteous indignation, two apostles of the apostrophe make it their crusade to rid the world of bad signs
Jeff Deck adds an apostrophe to the word mens at a clothing store in Wicker Park on Tuesday. He and his friend Benjamin Herson are traveling across the country correcting spelling and punctuation errors wherever they see them. [Tribune photo by Abel Uribe / April 29, 2008]
Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson have not wasted their lives.
They fight a losing battle, an unyielding tide of misplaced apostrophes and poor spelling. But still, they fight. Why, you ask. Because, they say. Because, they must.
For the last three months, they have circled the nation in search of awkward grammar construction. They have ferreted out bad subject-verb agreements, and they have faced stone-faced opposition everywhere. They have shone a light on typos in public places, and they have traveled by a GPS-guided '97
Nissan Sentra, sleeping on the couches of college friends and sticking around just long enough to do right by the English language. Then it's on the road again, off to a new town with new typos.
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