Gee, what a poser! A little letter that baff les our brains

IF you were asked whether you knew the alphabet, you would probably find the question insulting.

Yet a scientific study found that only seven out of 25 people could correctly identify a lower case version of the letter G out of a selection of possibles.

Known to type enthusiasts as ‘looptail G’, it is a letter we have all seen millions of times in newspapers, books and magazines – and in this sentence.

Not only are most of us unable to identify it in an identity parade, many of us are unaware it even exists.

Despite being able to read it effortlessly, only two people out of 36 even knew there are two versions of the lower case G, one like this – g – and one like this – g.

According to the researchers, our blindness to the letter g probably occurs because we don’t learn to write the letter’s looptail form at school, meaning few of us commit it to memory.

Study lead author Professor Michael McCloskey, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said: ‘We think that if we look at something enough, especially if we have to pay attention to its shape as we do during reading, then we would know what it looks like, but our results suggest that’s not always the case.’

The kind of g we learn to write at school is called ‘opentail’ – the one that looks like this: g.

The second is the looptail – g – which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts such as Times New Roman and therefore in most printed and typed material.

To test awareness, the team, whose research is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, asked 38 adults to list letters with two lower case print varieties, with only two naming G. Only one could write both forms correctly. ‘We would say, “There are two forms of g. Can you write them?” And people would look at us and just stare for a moment, because they had no idea,’ said study coauthor Kimberly Wong.

‘Once you really nudged them on, insisting there are two types of g, some would still insist there is no second g.’

In another experiment, 25 participants were asked to pick the looptail g from a line-up of four similar characters. Only seven picked out the correct one.

If you’re still unsure, the correct version in the panel printed here is the one in the top right hand corner.