“I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!” is not particularly insightful.
Can you read these words?:
• ervey
• raed
• pclae
Old English? Nope. Old Bullshitternet, tracing to 2003, which in the Internet world is the equivalent of Old English. Efere’s the post that these words are drawn from:
Can you read this? Olny srmat poelpe 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 deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer
8o
Bill Brohaugh
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? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
This post is cheating you. Yes, it’s remarkably understandable, if not precisely “readable.” But far more factors than simply the first and the last letter in their proper positions contribute to your understanding.
First, consider the hidden familiarity of some of these wrods. Who hasn’t transposed the o and the r in word while typing at least once? (I literally did so once while composing this entry.) Who hasn’t typed taht instead of that? These are mistakes, but mistakes that we know and recognize. (And perhaps even accept—note the rise of the “word” teh as an informal and often intentional alternate of the on the Internet—and see page 215 to be frightened by that.) There are many simple transpositions in this post, transpositions that are easily reswapped mentally.
Next, consider the absolute familiarity of surrounding words. Can in the first scrambled sentence, and I and was in the second, for example. Our most common, most functional, and most powerful words are short, and difficult to disguise using the rules of this game.
Further consider that the post is rife with clues to meaning. The paragraph is punctuated as a normal English sentence, from sentence-beginning signal Capital Letters to sentence-ending punctuation signals.?! Throw in the occasional logical comma (though a semicolon in one place would lend some grammar to the nonsense), and an actual paragraph begins to take shape. Even
the lone apostrophe is planted in a logical place— deosn’t is hardly the alien counterpart of doesn’t.
Other clues: capitalizing the improperly jumbled proper nouns: Cmabrigde Uinervtisy. Sentence construction and flow. Blatantly correct functional words (articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and so on, again, always short and unscramble-able in the rules of this game). Not many truly long words.
In regard to the latter point, how about if we were to jumble a common word to create the scrambled word slaybells? “Slaybells ring, are you list’nin’?” Just as the word list’nin’ in the above lyric from “Winter Wonderland” disguises the number of syllables in the original word, slaybells fools us into perceiving only two syllables when the source word had three. And the source word, of course, is syllables. The bullshitternet post plays no such tricks.
And an additional factor is not a clue, but a motivator. “Can you read this? Olny srmat poelpe can.” That’s a challenge. You’ll make this passage understandable if it takes you all week to translate it, even if it’s as opaque as a soduku with one number in it.
But perhaps most important to this post’s understandability: Context. Context. Context. Let’s return to the words that began this entry: ervey, raed, and pclae. You likely stumbled over them in their isolated list, and then breezed over them when they appeared in the post istlef (sic).
Context context context. The surrounding words, the surrounding discussion, even the shape of language itself. I once ticked off a friend as we watched Wheel of Fortune together. The puzzle displayed a long phrase in blank letters and spaces. The purpose of the game is to guess, one at a time, what letters might fit the puzzle until you can
82
Bill Brohaugh
guess the phrase. I didn’t guess this particular long phrase. I knew it. And announced it before a single letter was revealed. “This must be a rerun!” she fumed. I shrugged, and said, “Language has shape,” and that long phrase revealing no clues except how many letters were in each of its components had displayed its shape to me. But even during this Wheel of Fortune game, context ruled. I knew the general subject area because they announced the category/theme when the empty board was revealed. And I knew the phrase had to be idiomatic. Such context and shape allowed me to “read” absolutely blank letters.
And now that I have perhaps convinced you that this post is pure bullshitternet, I will, in the spirit that everything you and I know about English is wrong, point out that it’s right.
Our minds do indeed regard words as units, and not as character trains, the way we regard the Taj Mahal as a magnificent building and not as a series of individual doorways, domes, and spires. In fact, a problem I see in politically correct re-speechification is that “agenda-enhanced” persnickitors view some words as a stack of individual domes instead of a separately perceived structure (see my discussion of Fishkill, New York, on page 93, as an example). It’s just that the Internet post plays with you by suggesting that you could upend the domes and spin them about, lay spires on their sides and hide them under the couch cushions, and align all the doorways in a row until they form a grandiose hallway, and still call the jumble the Taj Mahal.
So, the post is right, and it’s wrong and (oh, stop it, Bill . . . ) it’s wrong again. Sort of.
As with most Internet posts, the source is specious: there is no Cambridge University study or sutdy or sdtuy. It seems that the ultimate source was a PhD thesis from a Nottingham University student,
by name of Graham Rawlinson, who in 1999 wrote a letter to New Scientist magazine about said thesis. Rawlinson concluded the letter:
The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
This was not easy to type! 27