random musing on the way I think...
So, the book I'm reading at the moment (The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg, who is likely my favorite English language author) has a tendency to use rather archaic sounding numbers. It's part of the way they speak in the book, and it's a first person narrative, so the writing itself has quite a bit of that same flavor to it. In this case, numbers tend to be "three and twenty" instead of "twenty-three." Kinda like Four and Twenty Blackbirds... Not hard to understand, unless it catches you off guard.
That said, the first time Portier, the main character, mentioned his age, he obviously used this way of saying it, since that's the way he talks, even for his narration. Two and thirty. 32. And I recognized the odd construction, parsed it into numbers 2 and 30... and proceeded (in my mind) to put the digits 2 and 3 together in that order (like numbers normally are constructed in English). In other words, I initially read it at as 23. ^_^;; (That said, I realized my mistake a few pages later, when another character's age came up, and my brain parsed it correctly this time. I went back to that mention, and sure enough, he was 32, not 23. ^_^;; )
It's just one of those things that makes me think about how my brain processes things.
Another one would be the t-shirt I have that says "WHOA" on it somehwere (I think it's one of my NaNo winner shirts). The word is all in caps, so all the letters are symmetrical along a vertical axis. This throws my brain for a loop when I happen to see that shirt in the mirror, because none of the letters look mirrored, but AOHW doesn't mean anything. ^_^ Of course, I know I'm looking in a mirror the entire time, and it's only a momentary disconnect, because there is and image on the shirt...
But when you look in the mirror, you expect to see things that look reversed. So the symmetrical letters throw you off. (At least, they throw me off.) I'm pretty sure it's one of those things with how we process language when reading. Like the studies that show that most people really only notice the first and last letters of a word and the general shape - the letters in the middle can be mixed up, and you can usually read it just fine anyway. (I dunno if that works with all writing systems... and I'm guessing it's nowhere near as true for people reading in languages they don't read proficiently.)
And yeah... just a couple of interesting things that came to mind. Now back to my book. (Which is awesome, despite the numbers that confused my brain for a moment at the beginning. ^_^;; )
That said, the first time Portier, the main character, mentioned his age, he obviously used this way of saying it, since that's the way he talks, even for his narration. Two and thirty. 32. And I recognized the odd construction, parsed it into numbers 2 and 30... and proceeded (in my mind) to put the digits 2 and 3 together in that order (like numbers normally are constructed in English). In other words, I initially read it at as 23. ^_^;; (That said, I realized my mistake a few pages later, when another character's age came up, and my brain parsed it correctly this time. I went back to that mention, and sure enough, he was 32, not 23. ^_^;; )
It's just one of those things that makes me think about how my brain processes things.
Another one would be the t-shirt I have that says "WHOA" on it somehwere (I think it's one of my NaNo winner shirts). The word is all in caps, so all the letters are symmetrical along a vertical axis. This throws my brain for a loop when I happen to see that shirt in the mirror, because none of the letters look mirrored, but AOHW doesn't mean anything. ^_^ Of course, I know I'm looking in a mirror the entire time, and it's only a momentary disconnect, because there is and image on the shirt...
But when you look in the mirror, you expect to see things that look reversed. So the symmetrical letters throw you off. (At least, they throw me off.) I'm pretty sure it's one of those things with how we process language when reading. Like the studies that show that most people really only notice the first and last letters of a word and the general shape - the letters in the middle can be mixed up, and you can usually read it just fine anyway. (I dunno if that works with all writing systems... and I'm guessing it's nowhere near as true for people reading in languages they don't read proficiently.)
And yeah... just a couple of interesting things that came to mind. Now back to my book. (Which is awesome, despite the numbers that confused my brain for a moment at the beginning. ^_^;; )