Let the Typo Stand

2 points · October 2026

I published something last week with a typo in the second line and forty people read it before I noticed and not one of them mentioned it. This was, I have decided, correct of them, and I want to argue that it was also correct of me not to fix it.

The typo did no harm. The sentence was understood. The thing the sentence was about was understood. What the typo did was mark the piece as written by a person, in a sitting, without the machinery of correction between the person and the page, and I find, looking at it now, that I like that mark and would not remove it.

We have grown used to text that has been through the machine. Spellchecked, grammar-checked, smoothed. It is good text and it is faintly dead, the way a photograph that has been retouched is faintly dead: nothing is wrong and nothing is there.

A typo is proof of life. Not many — a page of them is a different message — but one, in the second line, that forty people read past without comment, is a small signal that a hand did this, and hands slip.

Let it stand.