THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl 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.

Amzanig huh?

You can read all about it on my blog:

http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000224.html et al.

It was slashdotted and snoped:

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

And here:
http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=113313

Tnahks, jheem. You have at least one observant subscriber: Am I missing something? Rearrange the letters of "rscheearch" and you get "research" plus a spare "ch"...

>slashdotted and snoped

according to Wikipedia (certainly not the end-all of references), 'slashdotting' is the overwhelming of a website by a flood of page requests resulting from being mentioned on '/.'; I assume you're merely using 'slashdotted' to indicate that your blog and/or the discussion of this pehnmoneon were mentioned therein?

Yes, the canonical use of the verb slashdot means that as a result of a website being listed in a Slashdot entry, its server is overwhelmed by requests as folks click on through. Believe me, I noticed when I got listed in /. because my DSL bandwidth evaporated within minutes. For a week or so, I was getting up to a couple of hits per second. I still get a lot of traffic from the /. and the Snopes pages.

Wow, I know a man who's a legend in his own lunchtime!

The analogy breaks down with longer words, I've found. Jackie pointed out the misspelling of "researcher", but even if it had been written as "rasherceer" you would only pick it up from context.

Funny, though, how our brains can "forgive" the deliberate jumbling of ALL of the words in a piece of prose, but will zero in, unerringly, on a single spelling mistake ...

Yes, we're very good at finding patterns in a noisy environment and making sense of them. Random lists of jumbled words would definitely be harder to understand. There's also a lot of redundancy in natural language, for good reason, so we can tolerate jumbled messages. Makes you wonder why folks get so bent out of shape at spelling errors and solecisms.

Yes, it duz.

An he duzzent even have to werk hard fur it!

Makes you wonder why folks get so bent out of shape at spelling errors Because some of us have a personality that demands that things BE the way they ARE, and not they way they aren't. I think I've made it fairly clear here that I don't like gray areas. I want things to be either black or white. Or maybe sometimes one and then the other. But I want a clear delineation between the two--none of this, "Well, it could be this way if you look at it like this, but it could be that way if you look at it like that". That is not to say that I actually expect this, mind; just that I would strongly prefer it that way. I don't like permanent guesswork. I don't mind guessing my way through various types of puzzles, but I want to know for sure at the end what "the" answer is.
I want things to be precise. Errer is NOT error; never mind that I know what is meant. I have learned, with difficulty and not a 100% success rate, not to get so bogged down with what was and what wasn't, while telling a story that I lose my audience after my second sentence. But darn it, if such-and-such happened at 2 p.m., I can't stand it if somebody says it happened at 4. Even if the time has NO relevance to the point of the story, 4:00 is not 2:00! So--there's one reason for you.

Errer is NOT error;

- but if error is that which is not correct, then errer IS error!

Because some of us have a personality that demands that things BE the way they ARE, and not they way they aren't. I think I've made it fairly clear here that I don't like gray areas. I want things to be either black or white. Or maybe sometimes one and then the other.

How painful it must be for you to merely exist.

I am not against error-free communication, because I make my living trying to write lucidly about technical subjects for a technical audience. But, I know that language is as unruly as a rebelious teenager, always wishing to slip the arbitrary bonds with which folks attempt to constrain it. Lots of online writing is ephemeral and most of us do not take the writers to task for a typo, misspelling, or grammatical blunder, though of course we may cluck our tongues to ourselves when we read it.

What amazes me about English orthography is that so many people are invested emotionally in a system that is at best terrible, unreasonable, and ad hoc. I for one would be happy to drop our system for one that made sense tomorrow, but short of a revolution it ain't gonna happen. As for black and white in matters linguistic: have you ever looked at a dictionary or read a poem? There's nothing black and white about language, period! I am not chastizing you for your personality. I am not saying you are wrong for your crusade. I am just wondering about your state of mind, perhaps because I too share it at times. If I am interviewing somebody for a tech writing / editing position and their resume is full of errors of spelling or grammar, I suggest that we not hire the candidate.

But darn it, if such-and-such happened at 2 p.m., I can't stand it if somebody says it happened at 4. Even if the time has NO relevance to the point of the story, 4:00 is not 2:00! So--there's one reason for you.

Unreliable narrators are not always the fault of shoddy authorship, sometimes they are a part of the story. And they have been with us from the beginning of the novel. I'm not saying it's always that way, but sometimes it is. Sometimes our passions get in the way of our enjoying a good story. I once read a critique of an 18th century story that concentrated on the horrid fact that the author didn't know the difference between 's' and 'f', because most of the time these two letters were confused. The critic didn't know about long esses.

jheem>> I make my living trying to write lucidly about technical subjects for a technical audience

When I was in charge of some curriculum development for a UNIX, C, & C++ course, I caught a typo by the UNIX curriculum writer... "In order to [whatever], you mearly halfto [whatever]"

Good Lord, if I didn't pitch a High Holy FIT over that one, and I don't mind telling you I was totally justified. How much credibility does the writer, the editor, the publisher, or anyone else in the chain of development retain if something like that is thrown to an academic audience? <*SIGH*> Sheesh!

And I caught it after it had been through one rewrite and crossed the "editor's" desk twice. I spent many subsequent hours with my new best friend, the fine-toothed comb...

Funny, sad, but true. The editors were probably in a meeting trying to make the world safe by arguing about the amount of space between a bullet and its text.

OY! That's as bad as my pet peeve: should of.