Autocorrect mistakes abound, but have you ever made the errors yourself, such as typing the word buy when you meant by? Studies in Computer Mediated Communications have linked this phenomenon to the way we process words phonetically before typing them out. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Homophonic Errors”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Laura.
Hi, Laura. How are you doing?
Hi, Laura.
Great. How are you?
Where are you calling from?
I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.
Oh, well, what can we help you with today?
Well, I have noticed a really strange phenomenon that’s happening, and it seems to be getting worse as all of my correspondence has done with either emailing or texting or typing. I’m having this problem where my fingers are doing an auto-correction, and they’re typing a word other than the word I wanted to type.
So, for example, the other day I wanted to type the word century, and my fingers automatically typed central.
So you were typing century or sentry?
Sentry, S-E-N-T-R-Y.
Oh, really? And then you typed C-E-N-T-R-A-L.
Exactly.
Wow, so you’re your own autocorrect program.
Well, your own mis-autocorrect.
Auto-incorrect.
Exactly.
I was trying to, I think maybe one thing we could do is come up with a word for it, because it’s not an autocorrect, it’s an auto-incorrect.
Yeah.
Oh, boy, that is interesting. They study this sort of thing in CMC, computer-mediated communication. This is exactly the kind of thing that comes up. They don’t have anything fascinating to call it. I’ve seen it called contextual spelling errors, which is you have a real word. It’s just not the right word for the situation.
Oh, so maybe we could shorten it to CSE then.
And one of the explanations that I’ve read in these CMC journals, these computer-mediated communication journals, one of the explanations, and it makes a lot of sense, is that most of the speech that passes through our fingers to our keyboards actually goes through the verbal and oral speech processing part of our brain, right?
If I say the words to you now, discombobulate, you could probably write it without thinking where your fingers are on the keyboard, right?
Yeah, exactly.
But it’s still passing through these speech centers, which means at some point your brain may be converting it to the spoken word. That is, it’s finding the phonetics of it. And that’s why you can get a word like century out of central.
Or what was your example?
Century and, yeah, central.
Yes.
And it’s a pun. And I find that really interesting because I caught myself doing that the other day. I was talking about going by somebody’s house, and I spelled it B-U-I. Why in the world would I do that?
Yeah, we do this all the time. There’s something where you can see this in beginning readers. You can actually witness this process where the words pass through their eyes from a book into their brain, and then their mouth moves a little bit. It’s called sub-vocalization. And we all do this to a certain degree. I mean, at some point, you stop moving your lips, but your brain is still doing the work even if your mouth isn’t moving.
And so it’s kind of a hardwired thing in us for that language to pass through our brain in a certain way so that it involves our brain thinking about sounds as much as letters and shapes.
One of my co-workers gave me a great example, and I think this might help us out. She wanted to type interception, and instead it came out intervention. So I think we’re all moving too fast. We’re thinking and typing too quickly, and maybe we all need an intervention.
I like that. I’ll try to find some of the public information that’s out there that I can link to that talks about this. But academics and linguists have gone so far, and actually people working in the technology fields, because this is part of making sure, for example, that your Google search is understood, they’ve made lists and categories of the kinds of misspellings that we have.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they just know. They’re all categorized. Any kind of misspelling that you might make, they know about it. But they don’t always care about how it got there. They care about how to make their systems understand what you meant.
This is a really good question. I’m sure we’ll get some responses from the rest of our listeners. This seems like a universal problem, right?
Do you have a word for Laura? Do you have a word to describe that phenomenon of meaning to type one word, but typing a second word instead, and it’s a real word? It’s not just a misspelling?
Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to words@waywordradio.org.
Laura, thanks for calling.
All right, thanks a lot, guys.
Take care. Bye-bye.
Take care. Bye-bye.
You know, Grant, the other thing I notice is that I have habits of typing things. Like, you know, I grew up in Louisville, and if I’m typing the name Louis, I always type the Ville, and then I have to go back. I mean, I don’t know if that’s muscle memory, what that is.
Yeah, there’s a certain amount of autumn, right? Your brain is triggered into thinking of the most common word that you always type, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wish I could do that for larger blocks of text. Help Laura out or send us your questions, words@waywordradio.org. Find us on Facebook and Twitter or give us a call on the telephone anytime, 877-929-9673.
