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Meme Falsified

Peter Kam Fai Cheung SBS

Do you have a problem of always finding misspellings in your English drafts? "You correct them, but when you read again, there are still 'misprints'!" A very learned 76-year old lawyer made that remark to me, while he was checking a speech script.

Having done his speech later, the old lawyer, a Cambridge alumni, was so kind to let the audience have a copy of his script. When I read it, I could still see two 'misprints' in his final draft. Incidentally, an Internet meme that I received seemed to have explained the phenomenon from the psycho-linguistic perspective.

The Internet meme suggests that: "It deson't mttaer in waht oerdr the ltetres in a wrod are, the olny iroptnmat tnhig is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rhgit pcale. The rset can be a ttaol mses and we can siltl raed it wuohitt any pelborm. Tihs is bsuceae the haumn mnid deos not raed erevy lteetr by iltesf, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Upon verification, I have learned that the Internet meme was derived from a PhD thesis about the significance of letter position in word that: randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. The Cognition and Brain Science Unit of University of Cambridge used other sentences distorted in the same way to show that they were difficult to read and thus falsifying the meme and therefore the thesis. I always believe that the scientific strength of an argument lies not in its verifiability, but in its being not falsified!


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