Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Familiar Words That Look Wrong

You know that experience when you have looked at the same word so many times that it starts to look strange and wrong and mis-spelled to you? In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, I believe the word "wife" is called out as a familiar word that you suddenly aren't able to spell because you can't remember having seen the letters in that order before. I have had this feeling before looking at the word "who," which is, when you think about it, a kind of odd looking word.

Today I had a sudden inability to figure out what "foreign" was after seeing it several dozen times in a report I myself had written. It looked like a verb mis-typed with -ing becoming -ign and the final "e" of the root word accidentally left on - as though the word should be "foring." (I just googled "foring" and it says "Did you mean to search for foreign?")

There was a funny little moment when I realized that the word "foreign" was looking, well, foreign to me.

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