Sooner or later, the typo everyone makes

Sorry, I don't get it. Isn't 'stodgy" a real word? I don't see the... oh. Oh. Never mind.

And be sure to be extra-careful when writing about the new Large Hadron Collider, too.

Robin says: I used to work in Central Administration at Harvard and often prepared documents referring to the School of Public Health, and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. I always did two "search and replace"s before I sent anything out ...

Hee, hee, wonder how many people looked up "stodgy" before getting it!

I remember thinking when I was a young'un, "If the pubic area is supposed to be private, then why is its spelling so close to 'public'?"

It's so clever and self-referential of you to put a typo in your typo post! So meta!

I look forward eagerly to your next "addition..."

Robin says: Who's a clever boy, then?

And the article ended with a sentence that included the phrase "trash talking."

Huh. I know a lot of people struggle with commitment in a throw-away culture, but really...is it really recycling by the second date? Or do they mean when you get re-married to the same rusty old soul? Has anyone else written about green relationships, the ones that you can depend on for years and years?

If you type into google:

pubic mistyped for public

you'll see pages of stories of people's experience with this very common typo, including a post on http://www.businesswritingblog.com/ about how to configure MS word to automatically correct this error for you. The author notes: "The result? I no longer offer any pubic seminars."

Why is this typo so common? Researchers who study orthography and word recognition (the Petri dish of pattern recognition) explain typos as resulting from factors like these:

the mistyped word is higher frequency than the intended word (not true in the pubic/public case)

the mistyped letters have higher bigram frequency than the correct letters (may be true -- bi may be more frequent than bl)

mistyped letters form an easier finger pattern on QWERTY keyboard, such as using more dominant fingers (this is probably the case -- the l in public is typed by ringer finger and can be beaten out in a horse race against the middle finger)

And then -- why is it hard to see the typo during proofreading? Now factor 1 above comes into play. During reading, low frequency words (such as pubic) are very easily misread as their high frequency "neighbors" (defined as words that share all but one letter). In the word recognition literature, this is known as the blur/blue effect (in studies, low frequency blur is misread as high frequency blue).

In supportive context, misreadings are very common. This is evidence of "top down activation" -- the context feeds activation down onto a pool of mentally activated words competing for recognition. One of Robin Abrahams' friends in graduate school, Alison Morris, now a professor at Iowa State, wrote her dissertation on this topic, titling her work, "All those chocolate dandy bars can make you fat."

I just can't resist...
a few years ago I attended a lecture at HMS' Countway Library. There were multiple references to the name of the library in the announcement for the lecture, unfortunately the "o" was omitted.

Robin says: oooooooooooooooh.