Our typos, ourselves

How a list of my friends’ typos and mangled iMessages unexpectedly helped get me through the past year.

My memories of spring 2020 are bleak. I started a new job isolated from my coworkers at home, and in my spare time I was on Zoom with my friends, having a couple glasses of wine before logging off, a little tipsy but mostly just sort of numb and miserable.

But it wasn’t all bad — aside from having the luxury of being cooped up at home, I got through those early months on the strength of my group chats with my friends. And an uptick in texting each other all day and constantly communicating had some unexpected consequences — for one, a group chat formed a month or two prior to the start of the pandemic, Various Enemies Union (self-explanatory name, will not be providing further elaboration), got much closer, despite only ever having hung out as a group of three together in person once prior to lockdown.

Another result of our collective heavier reliance on this group chat and others for emotional sustenance: An uptick in typos. With not much going on outside of work, the members of the group chat—me, Erin, Demo—found ourselves talking to each other more, and without the attention span or mental capacity to notice what we were saying we were subsequently making a ton of little mistakes in our texts to each other. Little did I know that Erin had been taking our stupidest typos, as well as typos made by friends in other group chats, and compiling them into a…