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Samuel Regan  |  Unsplash

Semantic superheroes are taking to the streets

Reading time: 5 minutes 

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Under cover of night, two volunteers with a shared purpose and spraycans criss-cross the streets of Quito, Ecuador. They’re not revolutionaries, nor are they doing anything dodgy. They’re people who love grammar – radical copyeditors – and they punctuate the graffiti in their country’s capital. Inserting accents, commas and question marks in sentences graffitied on walls, as well as removing erroneous ones, they correct the syntactical shortcomings of poets in training and unrequited lovers.

The members of the group – Acción Ortográfica Quito (Quito Orthographic Action / QOA) – have kept their identities secret. There’s now a third member, for online work. They go by the names Diéresis (a symbol similar to an umlaut), Tilde (an accent) and Coma (a comma). Their edits range from first letter capitalisation to full sentence overhauls. An attorney, Diéresis was prompted into action by a badly punctuated graffiti on a wall he often passed. “Grammatical errors cause stress”. “I couldn’t believe that in just two sentences there were more than 10 grammatical errors” (cited in Varas and Watts). So, he looked for a discarded pizza box, cut it into a stencil, and called a friend to help. That first amended graffiti now conveys heartache rather than causing a headache.

Images and videos of the group’s work have spread on social media. Its name references Acción Poetica, a movement that started in 1966 in Mexico and whose members have been graffitiing love poems as well as messages of friendship and hope across Latin America for decades. Word of QOA’s efforts has spread abroad, and language activists in Europe, Latin America and Mexico have taken up the cause.

Diéresis likes the idea of making passers-by smile. By day, two of the group look for misspellings, errors and omissions, take photographs and discuss the original authors’ intended meanings. By night, they amend. They’re unsure whether or not what they do breaks the law. While police have seen them at work, they’ve taken no action against them.

Diéresis told Colors Magazine that “it’s a public service and a moral obligation. We’re against spelling vandalism and we won’t… give up until we see a society free of spelling mistakes”. There’s a big difference between “No quiero verte” (I don’t want to see you) and “No, quiero verte” (No, I want to see you) (cited in Keyser). “Many times, someone does not realize how a comma or an oversight can completely change the meaning of a sentence. It can change your life” (cited in Keyser). Their plans include increasing awareness and launching a hotline where people can leave tips about graffiti in need of editing.

They’re not political. They chose anonymity because they were worried about possible repercussions. Correa – Ecuador’s President at the time of QOA’s formation, in 2014 – regularly attacked those who mocked or criticised him. A member of the group had corrected a tweet by Correa. To demonstrate their political non-alignment, they also corrected a tweet by Quito’s mayor, a political opponent of the President. Fortunately, according to Diéresis, “the only person really annoyed by our actions is the author of the first graffiti we corrected… we have friends in common” (cited in Varas and Watts).

In Bristol, England, a man who has remained anonymous and is often referred to as “the Banksy of punctuation” has been targeting erroneous retail and street signs in the city. He carries a ladder and uses a home-made tool dubbed the apostrophiser. He says it started when, on a whim, he decided to scratch out a misplaced apostrophe in 2003 – a council sign that read “Monday’s to Friday’s”. In his view, letting offending punctuation stand is “more of a crime” (cited in Rossen) than his editing.

Some businesses consider his changes rude. According to the owner of a shop that, prior to correction, was called “Gentlemans Outfitters”, the man’s “defacing” of the sign could cost him thousands to fix because the added paint isn’t agreeing with the sign’s vinyl surface. He has promised to bill the vigilante for damage if he ever discovers his identity. But the BBC, which aired a 30-minute documentary on his work, have not revealed his name or any information to authorities.

The moral of the story? Absolutely everyone needs a great copyeditor…

 

Sources

Eduardo Varas and Jonathan Watts: Ecuador’s radical grammar pedants on a mission to correctly punctuate graffiti. 5 March 2015, amended 19 March 2015.
Jake Rossen: ‘Grammar vigilante’ is correcting street signs, one apostrophe at a time. 4 April 2017. (No longer available online.)
Kirstin Fawcett: Meet the secret grammarians in Ecuador who correct graffiti mistakes. 18 January 2017. (No longer available online.)
Hannah Keyser: The graffiti grammarians correcting street art in Ecuador. 28 July 2015.