from my inbox

[Doug_Harris]

Bank robber's note (seen on a Peodigy co-worker's
cubicle wall: "This is a stickup. Everybody stay clam."
cats22 (aka doug)


The salt and slat thing comes from context and in fact this is exactly the
type of typo that one makes, doesn't get caught in spell check and breezes
right through proof reading because, from context (please pass the slat),
when your eyes see slat your brain says salt and moves on down the road. I
found the three sentences equally easy to read with the one exception of the
word "council" in the second sentence which took me like thirty seconds of
staring to figure out, having read the rest of the sentence with no problem.
And the reason for that is that I had no contextual reference for a "council
tax". Even after I figured out what the word was, I thought - wtf is a
council tax? - then a little ding went off in my head when I remembered it's
Brit for property tax. In the third sentence I also spent maybe an extra two
seconds trying to see "negligence" and "malpractice" (my contextual
references) before "manslaughter" came through and I thought it odd as well
(you don't usually admit to manslaughter, you get charged with it or plea
bargain your way down to it). It has often been said (by me if by no one
else) that communication is 90% telepathy anyway. The words and letters as
read and/or heard just point the process of understanding in the right
direction. So the problem was not that I could not unscramble a seven-letter
word to make "council", the problem was that the context/concept had no
meaning for me. Had the thing read "ptorprey tax", eight letters, it would
have been as easy as the rest.
DAD

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