permuting letters and fairy tales

[David H Wild]

In article <60dfb6f6.0411121732.2e0ac82c at posting.google.com>,
   Carl Banks <imbosol at aerojockey.com> wrote:
> My thought is that, the brain doesn't read the word as a whole as they
> claim, but neither does it pay too much attention to the _exact_
> ordering.  So you could scramble the letters a little, and it will
> still be recognizable; but scramble them a lot, and you will have
> trouble.

In many cases, of course, we pick up what the word is from the context. If
I were to write "He was very tired, so he went to bad before nine o clock"
it is quite likely that the spelling mistake wouldn't be noticed - or that
people would read the sense and then think "there's something wrong there".
If the text had a dirty mark covering the letter between 'b' and 'd' most
people would see it as "bed" without missing a beat.

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