Help! My english is disintegrating into nothingness!!! Lately as I'm chatting in SL I've noticed the most disturbing phenomenon. I will know perfectly well which word I should be using but I will type a different version.
For example:
DJ: Sound?
me: Can't here anything.
[here? noooooo, it should be "hear." And I know that but my brain forgot to mention the correct spelling to my fingers.]
More recently, and to my extreme horror, I commented on a well read blog with this sentence:
I think you’re blog just made my list of 2009 Happy Places.
[you're? really? wtf was happening that I couldn't manage to figure out that the conjunctive of "you are" was not what should have been typed?]
This problem is bleeding over into my pseudo RL tasks like plurking and blogging. Perhaps it's the speed at which I type. But so odd that I would default to the incorrect word on a regular basis. Short of proof-reading every quip I spew forth I am not sure what to do. I suppose I'll be thankful that I know better, hope that those around me will not judge me harshly for my inability to use my words & maybe one day my brain and fingers will once again be able to work together successfully.
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2 comments:
I've noticed that the same effect has occurred with me as well, entirely since starting in SL: I almost never made homophonic errors like these in my previous writing. I've caught myself (too late, often) making even more egregious substitutions, in fact. But in most cases, they're what would be an audible mixup, were I speaking, not a typographical mixup. (Garden-variety typonese is another matter :-) )
I've given it some thought, and my hypothesis is that it's an immersion effect. In this case, our brains are convinced we're actually talking, not writing -- the writing centers are on autopilot while the speech centers doing the real work of communicating. Any old word that "sounds right" is then good enough as far as the brain is concerned.
I wonder if the same effect is seen in less immersive text-chatting environments -- AIM, YM, MSN and the like? It sounds like something Oliver Sacks should write about!
LOL I do the saaaame thing, even though I know better, and I, like you have plenty of writing experience. I dunno. Prolly chatspeak and those other loozers we talk 2 is the prollem.
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