I am a very fast but not particularly accurate typist. One of the reasons for my lack of accuracy is that there are some specific words which I have serious difficulty typing. These words usually come out with two adjoining letters switched. A good example would be “commerical.” Another is the name “Elziabeth.” Auto-correct usually doesn’t fix it for me, unfortunately.
Another word which jumps around like this is the word “jounrey,” scuse me, “journey.” I had occasion to type the word several times today. Then I was taking some notes by hand and needed to write the word via ballpoint pen and notebook paper. Yup, it came out “jounrey.” And here I thought the confusion was limited to the keyboard and the particular configuration of the letters on the keys. Guess not!
I know I have a few of these when typing, but the only one that comes to mind – although it’s not a letter swap – is typing “probably” for “probable.” I worked a bit for some lawyers and I always had to double check and correct “probably cause” to “probable cause.” I’ve also noticed on the Dope when typing while thinking, some words will come out spelled as their homophones, and I don’t mean confusing “it’s/its/its’” but something like “the redwood tree” coming out as “the redwould tree” or something like that. It’s really odd sometimes to see what comes out from under my fingers as I’m thinking and typing.
Becasue I proofread my posts, I usually catch all the times I swap the U and S in certain words. And the N and G in the suffix -ign. So you jsut won’t catch me makign those errors in my posts.
I just popped in to say that I think mysetrious is a really cool word. “Myse” from the greek Myso, or ‘unclean’, and the suffix “trious”, meaning 'in the state of.
Mysetrious: the state of being unclean.
I must remember that term, I can use it as a descriptor at work!
I can’t type “monitor”, it comes out “montiro” half the time. “George” comes out “Geroge”. And “udpate”, as mentioned above. This is on a full size keyboard. I don’t have a problem writing them out by hand or one-finger typing on my phone.
I make teh mistake of typing ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ so often that I’ve set up AutoHotKey to correct it automatically wherever I’m typing. Now I can keeping doing it without noticing.
I have a few like this, the first that come to mind are “repoistory” or sometimes “repoisitory” instead of “repository”, and “cofnig” for “config”. As a software engineer, I type both of those fairly often.
Half of what I write is in French, the other half in English. So my texting apps and word processors and browsers are always set to the “wrong” language for what I’m typing, and I get wavy red lines everywhere, to the point where they don’t mean anything anymore and I just ingore them.
Microsoft Word is the worst because it allows multiple languages in the same document, managed automatically based on the keyboard layout you’re using when you type a word, and it doesn’t tell you which language is where. So the red wavy lines are doubly useless.
Turn the spellchecker off. That’s one of the first things I do when I get a new computer/operating system/brouser/whatever. Those wavy lines just annoy me.
I renewed by battle with my old nemesis “elgible” a bit ago.
Flagged as a misspelling by my spell checker. It wants to sub “eligible” but that has an strange extra “i” and looks like a misspelling of “illegible” to me.
My long-time goof-up is ancinet for ancient, as if my fingers are tripping over the i before e rule because of the preceding c, but receiving causes no trouble.
