Saturday, May 24, 2014

Yow.

I look at the pre-edit title of the previous post (preserved for posterity in the URL) and wonder "Was I typing with my nose? Did I have a seizure?"

Tangentially-related, I don't touch-type in the classic sense of the word, in that I don't sit with eight fingers poised over the home keys, but rather do this sort of "rote and peck" using seven fingers. Mavis Beacon would frown on the "H" being struck with the left index finger and perhaps give an indignant sniff at a "G" or "T" being operated by the left traffic digit. 

At any rate, as my hands have largely freed themselves from needing direct visual supervision to drive the keyboard, homonym replacement errors have crept in. It's like the digits get the order from the brain to go off and type the word "there" and they're all "Sure thing, boss! We know how to spell that!" and then produce "they're". Obviously I know the difference, but there has to be some weird neuromotor thing at work there for it to only crop up once I no longer had to watch myself type...
.

13 comments:

Bob said...

Gertrude Stein would have really been engaging in whimsy had she said "Their is no they're, there."

Erich505 said...

Happens to me as well, and I no how two type . . .

;)

og said...

I got the same thing going on but I use the left index,the left thumb (Shift and spacebar) the right index, and the right middle finger. I can type pretty fast but not very accurate. Fortunately I can correct pretty fast too.

Alien said...

I learned many years ago that my typing style - not significantly different from yours - dictates a heavy proofread before it goes out in public.

I've increasingly noticed that homonym substitution, along with apostrophe abuse, is endemic on Mr. Gore's Intertubes, and seemingly even more so among those who should know better. (I won't go into what I saw over the years in the technical papers that crossed my desk: brilliant engineers who would not make the intitial cut at Engrish.com....)

I can't attribute it to generic sloppiness because "they're" is more, and different, keystrokes than "their" or "there." The same it true for interposing an apostrophe to make "it's" instead of "its." I've assumed some sort of brain fart is responsible, except that the error is repeated ad nauseum throughout a document, and brain farts are usually a single event,
not a series. Spell check doesn't help, even if one knows to use it. Never having used Dragon (or similar products), I can't assign blame to them, but I have my suspicions.

I do understand the compromises one makes in a rushed post, slid betwixt myriad more important tasks, especially where brain speed exceeds finger speed by orders of magnitude, but I can't help but disdain those who perpetually disregard simple rules of grammar; if the restrooms in a restaurant are dirty it's reasonable to question what the kitchen looks like.

Windy Wilson said...

"Homonym replacement."
Yup, only mine is a sort of mispronunciation in the manner of a dialect, for some reason, and I use all 8 fingers mostly in the approved manner.

Darrell said...

Either not enough coffee, or too much. ;^)

John Peddie (Toronto) said...

I've embarrassed myself with that one a few times in the last while.

Thesis: unwarranted overconfidence in one's keyboard skills leads to more rapid typing, and what comes out is (maybe) a homonyn, or something vagely resembling English.

Whatever the brain signalled to the fingers first just bypasses the mental spell checker and appears on the screen.

To one's mortification, if "Send" has already been hit, and it usually has.

Which is pretty much what you said anyway.

Anonymous said...

Alien said . . .

"... the same it true ..."
:-)

I've found that I need to wait three days or more to catch my own mistakes. A week is even better. Then it's more like I'm reading someone else's writing. It's much easier to catch your own mistakes when your brain has completely emptied it's read-forward cache.

BSR

Alien said...

@BSR - No excuse, guilty as charged.

I edited that comment several times in about 6 minutes to tighten it, and proofed it 4 times, but didn't print it or read it aloud. I caught the error on the first reading after Tam put it in comments, about 4 hours after I typed it. I learned, doing engineering documentation, to let stuff sit at least two days before re-proofing, and sometimes that wasn't enough. The only mea culpa exoneration I can claim is that it wasn't "Their riding in they're knew read car."

I'm sending myself to bed without supper....

Sebastian said...

I don't think any of the kids today would have any idea what you're talking about when you speak of Mavis Beacon.

And as our generations masters the query keyboard, we sit in utter amazement about how they can do unfathomable feats of typing with mobile keyboards.

It all comes down to practice. I took piano lessons from the time I was 5 until I was 22. There's right ways and wrong ways to do fingerings on that keyboard too, but Carl Czerny be damned, some of that shit just never worked for me, or the size of my hand.

Typing is honestly kind of the same thing.

Anonymous said...

Alien:

Have some ice cream first. :-)

I'm still finding stupid mistakes I put up on my own web-site years ago!

BSR

Ole Phat Stu said...

Og wrote "Fortunately I can correct pretty fast too."; which should have read "Fortunately I can correct pretty quickly too." Revise adverbs ;-)

Geodkyt said...

Heh. I type with five fingers - three on one hand and two on the other (and not the same five fingers, consistently).

Back when buying food meant documenting my ability at such, I was tested at 55+ wpm with that technique. Now? not so much. . .