from my inbox

Thu Sep 18 11:54:16 UTC 2008

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

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Lynne Murphy
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 6:49 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: from my inbox

Since I'm on the digest, it's possible that this has already been pointed
out by someone who's not digesting, but this "Cambridge University study"
is an urban myth.  There's a Cambridge University site debunking it:

<http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/>

The site is not very user-friendly in its organization, but it contains
lots of useful information, such as:

"This is clearly wrong. For instance, compare the following three sentences:

1) A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in
Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir

2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay
pneosenirs

3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who
deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur

All three sentences were randomised according to the "rules" described in
the meme. The first and last letters have stayed in the same place and all
the other letters have been moved. However, I suspect that your experience
is the same as mine, which is that the texts get progressively more
difficult to read. If you get stuck, the sentences are linked to the
original unscrambled texts.

Hopefully, these demonstrations will have convinced you that in some cases
it can be very difficult to make sense of sentences with jumbled up words.
Clearly, the first and last letter is not the only thing that you use when
reading text. If this really was the case, how would you tell the
difference between pairs of words like "salt" and "slat"? "
...

I get this e-mail from students at least once a year, and try to use it as
a Teaching Moment, but, oh, it's getting repetitive.

L

--On 17 September 2008 18:30 -0700 "JAMES A. LANDAU Netscape. Just the Net
You Need." <JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote:

>> fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
>>
>> Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
>>
>> i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
>> The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at
>> Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a
>> wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be
>> in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed
>> it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey
>> lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I
>> awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it
>>
>> Barry Auger
>> Hoe! Hoe! Hoe! Gardening Services Ltd
>> Email barry at hoehoehoe.ca>
>
>
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org