[ExI] Joyce (was: John C. Wright Interview)

spike spike66 at att.net
Sun Jan 27 17:48:20 UTC 2008


...
> 
>   John K Philistine
> 
> PS: I understand Joyce doesn't like punctuation, but why does 
> he cling to the bourgeois convention of putting spaces between words?
> heshouldhavewrittenanentirebooklikethiswhatajoythatwouldbetoread
> John K Clark


John, the despaced sentence is actually harder to read than the following
passage, which made the rounds on the internet a couple years ago:

I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rsceearch taem 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. Such a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed
Typoglycemia :)-  Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was
ipmorantt. 

I found I could read the paragraph durn near as fast as one that was spelled
correctly.  Am I the only one who can do that?  My notion is that a brain
somehow measures the length of a word with the peripheral vision by some
mysterious means.  So I am tempted to buy the argument that we are getting a
lot of cues from word length.  We may have trained our minds to do this from
hours reading hastily typed email messages, in which letters are switched.
Whaddya think?

spike










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