Banned From Parks For Correcting Typos:
From Boston.com: "A man from Somerville, Mass., and his friend who went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/22/sign.vandals.ap/index.html
There are worse crimes than misspelling, and these guys committed one of them.
The sign is question is a hand-painted sign that is considered a piece of art. If you'd like to see it, go here and ask yourself if you'd "correct" it.
Your so right about that.
Huh? Is it just me or does this imply that us regular peeps can go around modifying public signs willy nilly, as long as we haven't been ordered not to by a judge?
While it does sound odd, it's presumably for enforcement reasons: now if they vandalize a sign they are in violation of their conditions of release in addition to any relevant laws. This means that they can be thrown in jail (or otherwise sanctioned) without full criminal process.
While this person is pretty good at proofreading, accuracy as to 'factual' corrections is pretty iffy. The latest assertion I've found is 'Camembert cheese hasn't been made for ages!' Who knew?
In any event, this is a very annoying person. And I'm probably too thin-skinned about it. But I've had over two dozen library books so amended this year.
I wonder if I can get him/her arrested for defacing public property?
sidenotes
Wouldn't "emended" be a better choice than "amended"?
I suspect your copy editor is confused about US laws (and often stricter state laws) which criminalize young raw milk (unpasteurized) cheeses such as Camembert. The has always been a significant amount of bootleg unpasteurized cheese available in the US despite the law, either smuggled or illegally produced. These days there has been a loosening of enforcement on the unpasteurized cheese laws to the point where some cheese sellers market them openly although it is still illegal. Most commercially available cheese sold as Camembert in the US remains not a true Camembert but instead an aged raw milk cheese similar to Camembert.
Now there's a real novelty: confusion between The Volokh Conspiracy and Slashdot! :)
Hopefully you could, but speaking as a librarian, unless you actually witness the person defacing the book you will not be able to prosecute assuming you can get the police to arrest the person. So many people handle public library books that figuring out who actually damaged them is usually impossible unless you see it or they admit to it.
Here's a simple way to establish PC to justify the exemplar. By looking at who checked out the books with the defacement, if the same guy was the only one who took out all the books with the defacement that would fall under either INCREDIBLE coincidence (ha!) or probable cause to believe he did it.
Iow, there may be many people who took out those books but chances are only the defacer would have taken out ALL (of the ones with defacement). Then, the handwriting examplar would "seal the deal" by adding another piece of excellent evidence. That's how investigations are done. Piece by piece.
It's not rocket science.
The problem is, this isn't just a sign mass produced by a government sign painter in the park service sign shop. It isn't produced with a technology that could be easily replaced for a c-note like the mass produced signs from the Park Service shop. The sign damaged by these little morons is a hand-lettered item on fiber board, produced by the woman who was the architect who designed the building it describes. While her grammar and spelling might not measure up to her qualities as an architect, damaging the sign to correct her errors is an act of vandalism, since the Park Service chose to leave it as is, and not ask her to correct it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who should know better think this sort of individualism is acceptable, or repairable for a nominal fee. The woman in question is a noted early woman architect. Granted, she isn't someone of the national historical stature of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, but let's say someone vandalized his hand-painted sign that had been on display in one of the churches where he was pastor. Do you think a hundred bucks and an hour of "Joe the painter" from the community college would be adequate, or would you want to bring in a real art conservator?
The cost for conservation may surprise you. Yes, a stenciled, painted sign with a few words on metal can probably be replicated for a hundred dollars. But to repair damage to a hand-painted sign, consisting of a lengthy description of the building's features, and some graphics on a rather fragile surface like fiberboard, is not something that can be done by just anybody from the local sign shop. No, this isn't the Mona Lisa, but art conservators are not cheap. My guess is the consultation was the hundred dollar part of the job, and the three grand for an expert to try and repair the damage so it won't be too visible in the future.
I am aware of the difficulties of repairing defaced works of art, but they simply don't apply in this case. As I pointed out, the changes made by the foolish correctors consisted of moving an apostrophe and adding a comma. To repair this, one needs: (a) paint matching the original color of the text; (b) paint matching the color of the background; One simply paints over the added apostrophe and the added comma with the background color paint and restores the original apostrophe with the text color paint. This does not require the services of a conservator. And of course the sign is modern: there is no issue of matching obscure mediaeval pigments.
And by the way, though I agree that the sign should not have been "corrected", it is a rather minor work of art, which the Park Service clearly does not intend to preserve indefinitely. If they did, they would not have left it unattended out of doors in its original position where it is readily exposed not only to vandalism but to the elements.
Its true that there might be transportation costs, but let's remember, this is a simple job and it isn't a historical document like the Declaration of Independence. We're not dealing with paper hundreds of years old and ink or paint of radically different composition. It is not unlikely someone capable of handling this can be found in Albuquerque or Tucson. I doubt there's a need to ship the sign to Rome.
YEA. that's why they store mt rushmore indoors! (rolls eyes)
Although it would make you a suspect at first as well, it has to be a small list of people that have checked out all of 24 books, the odds would be astronomical. The library would investigate this, they have time for projects like this, and I would have to think defacement means something to a librarian. Now a conviction in court is another matter entirely, but I would see an end to that library card coming soon.
This whole thing reminds me of "Stuff White People Like" on grammar rules:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/12/99-grammar/
I agree. Crime should be cheap. If committing crime becomes expensive, people will be discouraged from it, and we wouldn't want to do that. I also agree that the culprit's offense here was in going too far. It wasn't wrong in itself. Isn't there a First Amendment right to deface public signs? Of course, the right isn't unlimited, and should stop at historic signs in national parks. Otherwise, it's the American thing to do.
I think it's a condition of probation that they not change signs, whether its illegal or not.
Its likely the damages also included administrative costs, as well as, repair.
But of course, no admonishments for the little morons who have written up public statements without a second thought to the grammar.
I'll give the sign writer a pass, since she was not writing up something official for the National Parks Dept. As for the rest of the 'vandalism', I would say, produce a grammatically correct sign, with proper spelling, and then you don't have to worry about these little morons.
Do we want to leave lots of bothersome and erroneous things around as is just because they are old?
And it's not as if the things they changed were correct when she wrote them and made incorrect by the changing of grammar rules over time, or matters of stylistic variation.
Isn't correcting errors and annoyances a service?
No one bitches about the fact that we never see Emily Dickinson's poems as she wrote them, with her varying-length dashes as the only punctuation. We only see them with "corrected" punctuation. Why is that good and this bad?
And given that these changes have been made, why would you want to restore it. Isn;t this now part of the history of this sign? Restoring it to its old error is like, in the midst of restoring a church, discovering that a lot of the problems stem from an inadequate foundation, and deciding to give it a new but identically inadequate foundation for the sake of historical accuracy.