don't give up just because it looks weird -- believe or not, you can read it:
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid!
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt 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 wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
i came across this while surfing (see dagkasher.blogspot.com ) and instantly felt a spark of excitement -- always having been one of those folks who can't spell her way out of a paper bag despite being reasonably well-read. mark twain's (or was it andrew jackson's?) musing that, "it's a damn poor mind that can only think of one
way to spell a word" was my credo -- and now the discovery that i don't even have to bother trying as long as the first and last letters are correct!? too good to be true!
but then i thought to myself... doesn't the above only work because we have the correct version of the word imprinted within grey matter somewhere acting as a context through which to view the erroneous?
hm.
so close.
3 comments:
postmodernist-asshat. nice one.
i still wonder about context, though. i don't doubt that we eventually learn to read by grouping -- in whatever language (it's quicker), i just suspect that we still need to learn by letter (or sylable or whatever) first, and that as we become aware of the frequency of certain words in certain contexts in our culture, we lose the need to spell them out and instead trust tendency.
(thus necessitating further attempts on my part to finally learn to spell, damnit.)
in fact, wasn't there some sort of experiment in the late 70's or something where, for a while, school children were taught to read based on word recognition? i heard that it failed because later on the kids didn't know what to do with words that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the groupings they learned in elementary school.
it's all very interesting.
i mean, could we ever really doing away with needing to know how to spell? would it really be possible to become so adept at reading situations, or so rigid as to be unable to conceive of more than one option, or so comfortable with not being sure, that the following sentence would be understood as the writer indended?
taht siatn wlil not do!
Supposedly our generation or maybe the one after us is concidered post-literate. Essentially because of the internet and other factors we read more than we speak.
So nxet tmie smoe old coger tell you kids tdoay aren't reading enuf kick him in the nuts and then again for ol' Billy Gates.
I think it's also got something to do with things like: IMHO :) and I NV U
anyway google it you'll get the whole full-on inter-scoop.
I just want to register my amazement that I could read that with almost no problem. But it felt weird in my brain. It wasn't like normal reading, I mean of course not, but wacky, I liked it, but I wouldn't want to do it very often.
Oddly, I think I'm a pretty good speller.
Nftiy! Ntfiy? Nitfy? Nifty!
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