ask-mark.com

I first saw this on my daily visit to slashdot. It is some particularly interesting research that has recently been published. I have yet to find the actual source, but there are mentions of it at Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey and at languagehat.com. What the jist of the research is saying is that you do not require a whole word to be spelled correctly to interpret it correctly; just having the first and last letter in place with the scrambled letters in the middle will suffice. For example:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.

That isn’t too hard to read, is it? I thought not. I like to think of writing as merely a complex art, combining a combination of twenty-six alphabetic glyphs with ten numeric glyphs and several punctuation glyphs to form a graphic with some sort of meaning. I mean, really, that’s all that writing is: a graphic. Instead of using low-level visuals of deer or trees, we abstract them into high-level words like “deer” and “trees.” We add some punctuation in there to help qualify the meaning of these word symbols, and viola, a sentence. On the languagehat.com entry, there is a comment by someone named Tony about determining whether a hash code consisting of the number of movements done to scramble the word would be equivalent to the difficulty in understanding the word or interpreting what the real word is. It’s an interesting thought. Anyways, that’s enough for now. I must get back to my slashdot and Ars, and then grab some dinner.