Is there any cure for language purists of my ilk? Will I/we ever be able to relax, irrespective of the knowledge that somewhere in the world public signs with misspellings abound?

Being a newly dubbed strait-laced language cop, I get it back twice as hard. I parade around commenting on other people’s typos, but when something I write, and by extension, something that appears in the Optic, has a glaring error, we catch it (not the error, the scorn).

How does it feel, Art?

A couple of examples:

In 2005, the Optic ran an article on the late Jesusita Aragon, the revered midwife whose hands-on efforts have helped populate Las Vegas. But a cringe-inducing misstatement got past us, and we stated that the elderly midwife “gave birth to 11,924 babies.”

Well, not even my maternal grandmother, Benerita Ortega Medina, who bore 16 children, could do what we claimed. In a later column, I made clear what we meant, as opposed to what we said. But even with that, I detected considerable pique from one caller who reminded me of our error — days after we’d explained it.

And speaking of signs:

Shortly after Managing Editor David Giuliani joined the Optic, he showed me the sign in our private parking space that reads, “Vehicles illegally parked will be towed at the owners expense.” “Owners” lacked an apostrophe, and Giuliani andI debated on whether it should go before or after the “s.”

Since the sign refers to the vehicles (plural), the rest of the warning should also be plural, and thus “owners’“ ought to win. One rule for apostrophes is simply to write the complete word first, and then add the punctuation. So we inserted an apostrophe with a broad-tipped pen and got back  to work.

Do Giuliani and I qualify for membership in TEAL? It stands for Typo Eradication Advancement League, whose aim is mainly to correct signs in public places.

An article e-mailed by my friend Miguel Mirabal, a former Highlands instructor and Memorial Middle School art teacher, details the quest of human spell-checkers, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, founders of TEAL, who arm themselves with Sharpies, erasers, adhesive tape and righteous indignation. Their zeal to clean up the language in public places got them in trouble. And, because of a charge of vandalizing signs in the Grand Canyon, they were banned for a year from visiting any national park.

The article, by Eric Aasen of the Dallas Morning News, states that “spelling isn’t always high on our list” when it comes to mangled messages. And there’s evidence.

The founders of TEAL, with considerable temerity, provided unsolicited grammatical help, in areas “littered with signs, posters, ads, menus — you name it — that are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.” These Apostles of the apostrophe” say most errors involve the much-misunderstood apostrophe — either it’s inclusion where not called for, or the omission when its necessary.

As noble as their goals are, Deck and Herson are not without their critics, and whether by pressure or even inertia, their cross-country road trips to fix faulty signage have slowed down.

Feedback on a TEAL blog, for example, insists that however noble the cause may be, people have no right to tamper with what is not theirs.

Deck and Herson believe that “slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only throughworking together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.”

Somewhere between “get a life” and “go for it” run the sentiments of people on both sides of the issue. An unrepentant language cop, I align myself with the “go for it” cadre, always believing we ought to try to be as typo-free as possible, yet allowing for human error.

But in a Chicago Tribune article, Deck and Herson said most of their multiple efforts to correct errors in restaurants and other businesses generally were met with “whatever” or “Yeah, I’ll tell the boss a bout it.”

A few years ago, when I volunteered to place announcements on the Chamber of Commerce’s reader board near Grand and Mills, I put up the letters for the Santa Fe Dessert Chorale, scheduled to perform the next day at Ilfeld.

That night, as I lay upon my cot, I kept wondering, “Could I have possibly misspelled ‘chorale’?” which is another word for choir or chorus? Traipsing back to the sign near midnight, equipped with telescoping pole and suction cup, I realized I had indeed used a word that’s pronounced exactly the same as “chorale,” but I’d spelled it “corral.”

It was an honest mistake. And I wasn’t horsing around and certainly didn’t mean to steer people wrong.

Now, if I can only borrow a step ladder to help me explore spelling possibilities on the SERF theater marquee, or whatever strategy might be effective with the oft-cited RHS electronic billboard….