Smicbnalrg lrttees

Thursday 25 September 2003 — This is 21 years old. Be careful.

The idea taht sicbralnmg ltreets dso’ent hurt the rdbeaaitliy of txet has been boglegd eerhvywere by now:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

But tpryhoapgi.ca has the most atvthutiraoie iifonrtmoan aobut it, iducinlng comnetms from the guy who did the ongiairl rasceerh (25 yaers ago).

Funny: now that I’ve created that paragraph, I find it very hard to read!

Comments

[gravatar]
Carl Tyler 8:43 PM on 25 Sep 2003
Maybe you have to be English to read it easily, I read that whole thing pretty much the same speed I normally read, or maybe I'm a slow reader?
[gravatar]
Stan Rogers 8:01 AM on 26 Sep 2003
Nah, it was a pretty slick read -- but I have noticed in other posted examples that there is the occasional word for which the scrambled spelling refuses to produce a meme association. Much of the meaning seems to come from Intellisense (TM) technology -- we need only fully decode the occasional word, and can then through most of the rest of the sentence. It's only when a surprise word is interjected, or when there is insufficient data to make a decent guess at what the next word is probably going to be that we have to resort to explicit decoding. (See what information theory as a hobby can do to you?)
[gravatar]
Stan Rogers 8:04 AM on 26 Sep 2003
"and can then through most of the rest of the sentence" -- I failed to take into account the probable means for intercepting HTML. I had used a less-than, word, greater-than construct to make the word "tab" appear as a keystroke entity. The word should have appeared between "then" and "through" in the excerpt.

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