Still on the Quest

(I stripped out all the html about cash advance loans, btw. I'm guessing that's there to get the google rating higher.)

Now honestly, if you look at my recent entries and consider the plethora of commas, complex sentences, arcane vocabulary and all, do YOU think of elementary school?

So "thyroiditis" is word number 86615 out of 86800 over at http://www.wordcount.org/main.php

But then again, a lot of words I use fairly often are near the tail. "pugnaciously" for one, and "antihistamine".

And "Conquistador" is right at the very end, but then again they're using a UK database --

Very interesting.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007425.html

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/


Oooh! Shiny!

Why is there never only one "cahoot" for us to be in?

I just got thrown out of a perfectly tense fic.

The other night I was reading a wonderful epfic that kept throwing me out too.

Why? Because people don't check the spelling past the spellcheck.

Homonyms homonyms wherefore art thou making me crazy?


It's "make do" my friends, not "make due". As in "make this do the job of that."

And "Ought" is about obligation or necessity. "Aught" is the word that means "something" -- compare it with "Naught" if you don't believe me.


I mix words up sometimes myself if I'm typing fast, but lately I'm seeing these two particular errors more often than I'm seeing the correct terms.

And it throws me out of the fic EVERY SINGLE TIME!

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!


E.T.A. Link for those who feel they would like some guidance: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

Found over at blackbird song's journal and cited by annwyn.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/fanthropology/136799.html

Don't forget to follow the link to the writeup about fan language use. I certainly recognized myself in some of that!

Your Slanguage Profile

Victorian Slang: 75%

New England Slang: 50%

Southern Slang: 50%

Aussie Slang: 25%

Canadian Slang: 25%

British Slang: 0%

Prison Slang: 0%

Since the option I wanted didn't exist for three fourths of the questions I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense, given that I've been reading too much Georgette Heyer lately.... Only Victorian's late for that...

I'd like to debunk the following rumor... You may have seen it floating around LJ.



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 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 toguhht slpeling was ipmorantt.





As I pointed out to another soul who put this up, spelling is important. There are three things going on here which are being neglected by the facile conclusion that letter order doesn't matter. The first is that you are a literate person already, and a fairly good reader, who is unjumbling words rather than understanding them with the ease which you read properly constructed English. The second is that you are reading words within the context of a sentence, where every unjumbled word eases the way for unjumbling the next word. If you took all the words in the paragraph above and made a list of them, altered the order of the list, and then had someone try to read the words, they'd be slowed down considerably. The third consideration is that none of these words have letters omitted or added. If they did, you'd be far more bollixed than you are.

We don't read words as a whole -- that fallacy has been the basis of several disastrous attempts to teach children to read without learning phonetics -- but we are very fast unscramblers of scrambled words when the first and last letters are in their correct places, particularly when the word is within the context of a sentence or paragraph. At least, we are once we've had a great deal of practice at reading!