The written word
I recently had to convey an important point of view in an e-mail to a person of high rank at a trend-setting financial institution in Gauteng. I again checked my message after its dispatch . . . too late. There was an unforgivable language error in a key statement. I felt stupid. I decided to write again, correcting my mistake, also apologising profusely.
The recipient responded, also adding informally, "Wow, I did not even notice a typo, until you pointed it out". In informal spirit she surprisingly had the will to go on, "Here is an interesting challenge for you. What do you read in the following?"
It deosn't maettr in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt apcest is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn biarn deos not awlays raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
She offered a possible explanation for the ability in having no problem to read such concoctions. Now I again felt stupid – she did not realise that I could not follow it at first. Well, I assume you could! Nevertheless, here is the normal version:
It does not matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important aspect is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because the human brain does not always read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole.
My correspondent went on, explaining that it does not only bear on the first and last letters. According to specialists in psycho-linguistics, our brain tends to "move over" mistakes, going for a comprehensive presentation of the whole - sorting out jumbled-up words.
An easier one: Tsehe wdors may look like nosnesne, but you can raed tehm, can't you? You can porbalby raed this esaliy dseptie the msispeillgns. [These words . . . nonsense, . . . read them . . . probably read . . easily despite . . misspellings.]
Going through all this, I suddenly remembered that Wilderness resident Phillip Kuypers mentioned such linguistic research had been done at "Cmarbgide Uinervtisy" in 2004 already. He said, "Yaeh, I awlyas tuhoght slpeling was ipmorant". No doubt, correct spelling and good language usage are important. We dare not use escapes and excuses to challenge correctness and uniformity - so irreplaceable in good communications.
Years ago some academics were highly excited. They initially trusted that the spell checks of computers would save them much work. Especially in dissertations and theses submitted for examination, such heavy duties would be off human shoulders - to be done by "machine mechanics".
Many surprises and red faces, however, resulted. Example: in a research report on the underground water systems of a city, natural and man-made, all "manholes" in the text were changed computer-wise to "person-holes".
* Prof Francois Hanekom's column, Our World / Ons Wêreld, appears every second week.