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Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 725
old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 725 |
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?
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
>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?
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
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.
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624 |
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 ...
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 2,636
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2001
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An he duzzent even have to werk hard fur it! 
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Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
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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.
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