instiution.

instiution.

Did you get that?

Read it again.

Exactly, you could easily miss it the first time. ESPECIALLY, it lies deep in an article dealing with finance and economics where the word “institution” is frequently used.

In an article aptly titled “Why your brain can read jumbled letters (find it here). Laura Moss did an excellent job of explaining the phenomenon of how the brain can understand meaning despite incorrect spelling. According to her, part of the reason could be the part played by context in deciphering meaning and therefore self-correcting the words in your own mind and preventing you from consciously identifying the error.

Think about how we jump to conclusions in conversations. Think about how often there may be a missing word in an email but we are still able to extract the gist from it and probably, with a high degree of accuracy in understanding formulate a reply.

Turns out Cambridge University, a leader in the field of language study and a preserver of English language purity, has conducted a fair amount of research in this area. Apparently, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are set, the important thing is that the first and last letter should be in their correct place. The human mind doesn’t read every letter by itself but the word as a whole and then makes sense of it in context. Brilliant.

Typoglycemia.

Check it out on Wikipedia here. There’s a name for this curiosity.

Of course, contradicting ourselves here a little, Wikipedia says the Cambridge reference is an urban legend and that research was not in fact done at the University of Cambridge. Anyway, Typoglycemia is basically arrived at by mixing “typo” and “hypoglycemia”. In case you were wondering, that last one refers to the medical condition of having a low blood sugar, rendering the afflicted to a state of confusion, with sweating, and weakness amongst its many symptoms. Not sure exactly how this is all related … but we digress.

The appearance of the incorrectly spelt “institution” is unlikely to have been intentional. It’s basically another case of typing incorrectly and ignoring the almost inevitable indication by the most common of word processors. If you’re going to publish and want to be taken seriously. Get the spelling right. Please, speak proper.