Like presidebt, I also came into this thread because of the unusually high number of typos in the title, but the word farglestabbeed made my day.
Farglestabbeed!!
My father was a printer for nearly 35 years before he died. For the last 15 or so, he owned his own business, which meant he was responsible for typesetting and such. My brother and I would help him and my mother out when we could, and they gave us one simple rule for proofreading. “Read it backwards.” This forced us to read every single word, out of context, to make sure it was spelled correctly.
She’ll be so turned on by my command of the English language, and the unusual way in which I propositioned her, that she’ll have no choice but to farglestab me right back. Twice, if I’m lucky!
i kenw it mhigt be wtorh oepinng tihs tehard wehn i saw it rcaeh two pgeas, wired…
[hijack]
In the Metro (subway,tube,etc) we have a simple 3color screens that show the weather, news, some commercials, etc.
And it happens that if i sit right under it, or in an angle, i read it all, backwards, from its reflection on the opposite window…
[/hijack]
Do you know I think this is an excellent point. I have no problem picking up others mistakes when I proofread, but rarely find my own. Next time I make a mistake, I’ll have to go see it this is why…
So how do you properly mispell a word when a combination of its letters can also make another word?
i.e. skate and stake, carp and crap, trap and tarp, smile and slime
I think “properly mispelling” is an oxymoron.
S4H, surely you mean an omxoyron?
Context. Context. Cntxoet.
Just one misspelled word by itself would be impossible to figure out, but in a sentence, it’s not difficult.
I also only “saw” one misspelled word in the OP (relaly) and had to read the text only slightly more slowly than normal, but…
[minor hijack]
I think reading these scrambled words would be much more difficult if the individual letters are reorganized in such a way that the resulting letter pairs (vowel-consonant, vowel-vowel, etc) are pairs that occur commonly in real english words. I once tried to do an unscramble-the-word puzzle and found that it was far more difficult than normal because the person who wrote it (my sister-in-law, who takes great joy in making others’ lives difficult, no matter what the medium) went to the trouble of using this letter pair trick. For example, she might scramble the word “problematic” as “tramblepico”. I suppose to make this example consistent with the “same first and last letter” rule, I should scramble it as “plematrobic”. Of course, this trick works best on long words. Shorter ones have fewer believable combinations of letter pairs.
Sorry. I’m done now.
[/minor hijack]
Oddly enough, the same thing was posted on a board I am an administrator at.
But I doubt you took it from there. It’s not that well known of a board, particularly if you’ve never played the game Fallout.
(On a complete hijack, though, the original denizens of that board made it into a random encounter in Fallout 2.)
What I find even more interesting is that I did a Yahoo! search on:
“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy”
and got 100 hits. Yahoo!'s suggested spelling correction?
Did you mean: “According to a research at an Elings university”?
I wonder if folks that play with anagrams all the time even notice anything out of place.
This explains why people who do not see 20/20 can sit in the back of class and still read everything on the board…
I see at about 20/30 and I’ve seen signs on walls and the road that I could read fine even though it was fuzzy. If the sign contained just a random set of letters, I would not be able to tell you what the letter was.
There are times I can read the whole sign as quickly as anyone else until it comes down to the phone number or address…
I wonder what would happen if a non-English-speaker had to try and read like this? A non-latin-alphabet-user?
I mean, of course, someone with relatively good command of English, but who is not a native speaker.
Any non-speakers want to share their experience reading this thread (I picked up English as a native language, so I don’t qualify, despite my location)?
“peritrochoid not graphic designer or a typesetter. Just a dyslexic Physicist who has studied neural perception.”
Bippy, I think you’re my new hero.
My wife’s Russian, and she read it fine.
Here is what I found istnerenitg. I don’t recall reading the title at all. The first odd word I spotted was the jumbled ENGLISH.
– Ooops, I almost said spooted. That would go against the rule.
Asimov told the tale once of a sweet young thing who clasped her hands joyfully at a dinner table and exclaimed, “Oh, Dr. Asimov, you’re so levacious!”
After some consideration, he decided that she meant “lascivious” and that her habit was to get the first and last sound correct and let the others fall in place however they might.
Well, there’s more to the reinvention of the word than that, but it just might be writhwhole to experiment on whether a scrambled phonemes spoken word sentence would also tend to be comprehensible.
True Blue Jack
I thnik that dairaphgs* shluod be wrtetin tethoger. It mkeas it esaeir to raed.
*Diagraphs = two letters to make one sound.
I thnik that dairaphgs* shluod be wrtetin tethoger. It mkeas it esaeir to raed.
*Diagraphs = two letters to make one sound.
OK, now this is getting to be eerie!
When reading the quoted post for the first time, I noticed that two words were msleispeld. Fine. then, for some reason I read through the post again. And I only saw the word istnerenitg as being wrong! :eek: Took me about five more scans to find writhwhole again.
Curiouser and curiouser
Dan Abarbanel