I made a really dumb mistake in another post: I wrote something was given a free reign when I should have said free rein. It wasn’t because I don’t know the difference between the two (I do), or because I had been working all night (I had). I wrote it because I was thinking and typing at normal speed, and that’s just what came out unconsciously. :smack:
Is there a name for this phenomenon? How often does it happen to other people?
It’s called “misspelling” and it’s very common when intelligent people with large vocabularies aren’t paying sufficient attention and substitute a homophone. Relax, it’s normal.
What I hate is when I accidentally a word without realizing it. Even upon rereading I may not notice, because I know that word is supposed to be there.
If it makes you feel any better, I just totally forgot how to spell ‘‘impermanence.’’ And I almost always spell ‘‘disappear’’ wrong. (Well, I rarely spell it wrong anymore because I have written it so many times while explaining that I can’t spell it.) Those aren’t even the dumbest things I’ve done today. It’s okay to be unperfect.
[In the voice of Leonard Nimoy’s Mr Spock]: Thank you, drewtwo99. I shall seriously consider your advice.
In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills mentions a similar phenomenon that he calls “dittography” in describing how Lincoln would write out copies of his Address once he was back in Washington: apparently, Abe would unconsciously repeat or omit words, or inadvertently use synonyms that were almost interchangeable with the text’s original words, but not quite. Wills explained this by saying that the mind races ahead of the eye while writing, and we don’t notice the differences until after we’ve already written them.