07 November 2007 02:17
remember this one? it made the rounds a few years ago:Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.somebody used it as an illustration during a sermon once and i immediately fell in love with the concept. it's the very same concept that renders anything i write outside of microsoft word intelligible. I did some interesting reading this morning on a medical research council website written by a Matt Davis. the interesting bit is the second half of the page which starts below the non-english examples (text search for "This is clearly wrong" and continue from there).
the gist of Davis website is this: there is some truth to the quote above, but as a generalized sweeping statement it's bunk. a sentence of words with truly scrambled innards is harder to interpret than the carefully constructed example above. for instance, "a dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur" (translation) is a fairly hard read.
what made me look those things up in the first place was a post i came across the other day apologizing for a misspelling in a previous post. i read it and moved on—no problem. until a couple of the comments caught my eye and i took another look at it. noting another misspelled word i copied it and plopped it into msword. bang, it was a bloodbath of red squigglies:
Confession: The mispelling (now fixed) in today’s comic got there acciddentaly; it wasn’t another little joke, just hubris striking. “Foreign” is one of those words I mispelled unknowingly for years. I’ve corrected it — on principal I usualy don’t edit comics after the first few minutes they’ve been up, but most of the time I’m around when they do. Due to my weird schedual I was out of touch for the last 14 hours, and came back to find I’d recieved something like 150 “I don’t know if you meant to do this, but …” emails. Oh, well. Its a lession in humillity.i know my spelling is atrocious, and 75% of it is me being too lazy to proofread. 25% is probably genuine ignorance. but i find certain satisfaction in the fact that i read the above paragraph and gathered the surface intent without being bothered by the technicalities. in this case, i actually missed out on the primary intent/irony, but how often does a writer base irony off of spelling? it's a risk i'm willing to take in order to be able to read something without cringing every time a typo/misspelling comes along.
I've had portions of eats shoots and leaves read to me and will admit that a line needs to be drawn somewhere in favor of structure...but i tend to draw that line in a fairly comfortable zone where structure can give provided comprehension and understandability still rank high.
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