The Evolution of My Typos
Way back, when I took typing class in high school (one of the most massively useful classes I ever took), my typos were distinctive. ‘s’ was transposed with ‘l’, ‘d’ with ‘k’ and ‘f’ with ‘j’. Look at your keyboard - you’ll see the pattern. I had (or have) what seems to me to be a weird form of dyslexia. I don’t know much about dyslexia and looking it up online isn’t very helpful because the definition is so broad. But my hang-ups are pretty specific: I transpose things. When I was in first and second grade, I transposed entire words. I saw words as easily backward as forward, and in most cases didn’t understand that I was reversing them. ‘tac’ was the way I spelled ‘cat’ and to me, it was clearly correct. ‘cat’ looked weird. I had several rounds of speech and cognition therapy, then went on to have excellent progress in school.
When I started typing, the same issues cropped up, but in a different form. Now I was reading the letters correctly and in the right order, but somewhere between the letter recognition part of my brain and my fingers, the signals would get crossed. I had the same problem from time to time on yes/no questions, true/false questions, red and green stoplights, husband/wife and male/female. I usually caught myself as I said it, as I could hear that the word I was saying wasn’t the right one. Failing that, there was always the blank look on people’s faces to clue me in.
Years later, my typographical errors slowly migrated from being dyslexic transpositions into simpler, smaller switches. Instead of switching hands, little letter groupings would get reversed. So ‘standard’ would become ‘satndard’. And of course there was also the usual dropped letters and fat-fingers where I’d accidentally get my hands in the wrong position for a moment and strike an incorrect key.
Recently I’ve discovered that my misspellings are spelled right. They are actual, complete words - just not the right word. This isn’t a case of autocorrect function either, because I don’t have autocorrect enabled on my home computer, where I do the majority of my writing. All my computer does to help is underline dubiously spelled words and poor grammar. I’ll discover I wrote ‘guy’ instead of ‘buy’ or ‘fence’ instead of ‘road’. Usually the substituted word is pretty similar (guy/buy), but not always (fence/road). Sometimes Sylar gets swapped for Peter or a hand for a foot - both of which can make for some very weird sentences. I’ve been catching them in re-reading, and I re-read my stuff rather obsessively.
That’s my thought for the day.