I’m working on some longer pieces that are taking forever; here’s something so you don’t forget about me. I write you today in praise of the lowly typo.

Let me be clear when I say “typo.” I don’t mean errors of ignorance. The other day I was telling someone that I want a dating app that comes with a filter to screen out men who don’t know the difference between “there” and “their,” or “discreet” and “discrete.” (An app that filters out men who use the word “discreet,” spelled correctly or otherwise, would also be useful, but I digress.) Those are not typos, they’re indications of someone who didn’t pay enough attention in school.

Typos, as I’m using it here, are errors of carelessness: misspellings, dropped articles, subjects and verbs at odds with each other. Not really desirable! And yet, useful.

In Middlemarch, there’s a moment when George Eliot suddenly loses track of her trees: a row of lime trees morphs into yew trees and later back into limes. When I pointed this out in an undergraduate discussion, our professor noted how carefully Eliot normally was with her details. Apparently she kept shelves of notebooks containing every detail of her novels. She was obsessive. And yet, these indecisive trees.

It was a clue, Professor Ward told me. Something else had distracted this normally meticulous writer so that she forgot what was lining the drive to Casaubon’s estate. There was critical gold to be mined in that moment. I, for one, never mined it. But I took the more important lesson.

I was reminded of this reading Jonathan Bernstein’s column about political ambition as a virtue. Bernstein and his colleagues are worth reading, if you enjoy reading about politics, particularly on the topic of the way political parties work (or, in the case of one party today, don’t). Today’s column is riddled with typos, enough that I started to really notice them. Some folks might be annoyed by that, I suppose (and as a charter member of The Pedantics, maybe on some days I would be).

In today’s post, though? Bernstein is just clearly pissed off. Pissed off at the state of the world maybe, pissed off at one politician in particular and the toadies and incompetents that support him (that’s a default position, in truth), and primarily pissed off at one particular effort to defend what is so clearly indefensible that he spends a full column’s worth of work cutting the “argument” to shreds. And then says what he really thinks.

Every now and then it’s good to see a reasonable, scholarly man get pissed off at the indefensible. I can picture Bernstein pounding away at his keyboard, steam coming out of his ears - eh, probably not, he’s reasonable and scholarly - but in any case, hammering the “send” button before he can have second thoughts about any of this, proofreading be damned. I feel that way sometimes. I try not to indulge in it, most of the time. But sometimes you have to let loose.

So: one cheer for typos. And three cheers for the moral and intellectual compasses that cause us to make them.

Addendum: Jonathan replies that no, he wasn’t angry. Maybe I’m the one who’s angry. I stand by my general thesis, though.