Weird typo
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Back in the day, we used to talk about strange typos and tried to figure out how they happened.
Here's a good one.
I typed the following sentence:
Once that one foodstuff you said everybody likes to consume but is hard to resist and is not good for us?
When I proofed the note and saw what I had written, I was flummoxed because what I wanted to write was this:
What's that one foodstuff you said everybody likes to consume but is hard to resist and is not good for us?
What happened between my brain and my fingers that caused the first word to come out that way?
"what's" –> "once"
Rereading the sentence, there are other parts that I would rewrite now, but that's a matter of composition and grammar, not typing mistakes.
For me, the causation of such mysterious typographical errors is not just a matter of sloth or clumsiness. Since they often come out in ways that are superficially intelligible but logically and grammatically impossible, I believe that intelligently studied, they might be able to tell us something significant about the way the brain and neuro-muscular system work.
Consequently, I shall continue to keep my eyes on such mystifying typographical errors in hopes that they will reveal important data about the way the human brain and language faculty function.
Selected readings
- "The weirdness of typing errors" (3/14/22)
- "Excepted for publication" (7/30/21)
- "Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20)
- "'One I first saw': more on homophonically induced typing errors" (4/8/20)
- Two types of 'errors' (again) and it's all 'grammar' (again)" (3/14/05)
- "A Cupertino of the mind" (5/22/08)
- "withe" (12/14/08)
- "What is it, Lassie?": (8/4/09)
- "The birth and death of typos" (3/17/12)
- "What the fingers want" (7/30/15)
- "So borrowing and meaningless" (5/27/20)
- "Delete / elite button" (6/22/21)
- "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue" (3/4/18)
- "'Evil being protesting'" (6/27/18)
- "An odd error" (9/24/19)
- "Massive miswriting" (7/25/18)
- "Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)
- "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
- "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
- "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
- "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': SPP turns 300" (7/20/20)
Michael Vnuk said,
February 17, 2025 @ 5:56 am
'Once' has a 'w' sound at the front and a 's' sound at the end, so it sort of matches 'What's'. Furthermore, I think you had interference with the word 'one' which you were going to type soon after.
Nice find. I feel sure that I have done similar things and they are intriguing to try to work out.
Jenny Chu said,
February 17, 2025 @ 6:44 am
I regularly make such phonetic typos, even when I absolutely know better. In some sense, am I still "hearing" the words as I type them? (Now that I am thinking about it, of course I'm hearing them. I'll need to "catch" myself typing at some point when I'm not already thinking about it and examine whether or not I was "hearing" myself then *sigh*)
Victor Mair said,
February 17, 2025 @ 6:47 am
Michael and Jenny:
Great comments!
Chris Button said,
February 17, 2025 @ 9:59 am
The ending seems to be the classic "cents" vs "sense" (non)distinction.
As for the nasal intrusion, there is a tendency to nasalize vowels after voiceless fricatives. Is your "wh" the now common approximant [w], or is it the older voiceless fricative [ʍ]?
Chris Button said,
February 17, 2025 @ 10:03 am
Or perhaps I should say, there is a tendency for vowels to be perceived as nasalized after voiceless fricatives.
Incidentally, there is some interesting evidence for that in Old Chinese, but it's a little off topic.
Ton van der Wouden said,
February 17, 2025 @ 1:00 pm
Nice example of a parasitic gap in the wild
Barbara Phillips Long said,
February 17, 2025 @ 1:58 pm
Recently I was reading an online post and comments, and the writer was talking about having a second way to earn some money via a “side hustle,” except the text said “side hassle.” Commenters were amused by this, and the writer commented that they relied on speech-to-text software to write due to a disability.
Chas Belov said,
February 17, 2025 @ 5:38 pm
I seem to have outgrown it (now watch me prove myself wrong – oops, just did, typed "wronk" and caught and corrected) but sometimes swapped t and d or r and s at the end of words, both with writing and typing. "t" and "d" makes sense (just typed "sence") – as does "g" and "k" – but I'm puzzled by "r" and "s."
John J Chew said,
February 17, 2025 @ 10:18 pm
If it helps anyone's understanding, I have total aphantasia but most of my typos are still phonetic. :)
Matt Anderson said,
February 17, 2025 @ 10:31 pm
I pronounce those two words /ʍʌts/ (or maybe /hwʌts/) and /wʌnts/ – if I pronounced the initial the same like most Americans, the only difference would be the -n- in the middle. Do you have the wine-whine merger? The difference seems very important to me, if I’m reading eye dialect, or written slang like wack/whack, but I never seem to notice the difference in speech.
doug said,
February 18, 2025 @ 1:00 am
Visually impaired folks will often say "sided" instead of "sighted" online. I'm not sure what leads to typing it that way, but I know that when the screen reader announces "sighted" and "sided", it's nearly indistinguishable.
I wonder if that's what's happening here. In the case of a screen reader, typos don't matter if you end up hearing the right word anyway!
Philip Taylor said,
February 18, 2025 @ 9:43 am
« when the screen reader announces "sighted" and "sided", it's nearly indistinguishable » — would that be when the screen reader is configured to emulate an American voice, Doug ? I can well believe that in spoken American "sighted" and "sided" might well sound very similar, but in British English I would expect them to be clearly differentiable.
Nico said,
February 18, 2025 @ 11:14 am
Blind screen reader user and first-time commenter here: I do use an American voice which flaps its Ts and Ds, causing "sided" and "sighted" to sound identical. "Cited" also sounds the same as the other two, but that's expected since they're homophones. The problem arises when I spell something incorrectly and don't realize that I do because the particular TTS voice I use says the misspelling like the target word. A great example of this was the word "necklace", which I kept spelling as "neckless" until slightly more than a year ago, and MS Word's spellcheck didn't flag it because "neckless" is a valid English word.
Sidenote: since I rely on sounds to determine what's said on a computer, not letter shapes, I catch misspellings very easily when they're not pronounced properly. As an example, I typed "more" as "mroe" in this comment, but immediately noticed as I proofread since pronunciations are radically different.
PS: I'm not sure how LLOG comment formatting works. Expect HTML tags.