posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 01:45pm on 2008-04-17
It feels like two steps to me, but my sense of just what the two steps are isn't consistent. Until shortly before I wrote that, I hadn't really analyzed the mechanics before, so I'm still inserting debug-writes into subconscious processes to give myself a fair shot at figuring out exactly what my brain is doing.

At least part of the time, the first step is a separate ... uh, recognition hase ... an "Oh that word!whyisn'titinGreekletterstobeginwith" moment. On other trials that doesn't feel like it's a separate step but what comes after has an extra hiccup in it that I'm still trying to pin down how to describe. I think the presence or absence of Greek letters represented by Latin digraphs is a factor, but I haven't watched myself over a large enough sample of verbs yet.

(Gee, if I could just single-step through mental processes at that level ... but that's one of the many places the brain-as-computer analogy breaks down.)

Of course, there's always the chance that attempting to observe myself from the inside in real time will produce a different answer than a neurologist specializing in language processing and equipped with fMRI tools would come up with after analyzing my brain. *shrug* Gotta make the attempt with the tools I've got.

I don't think I've encountered "write-o" enough to really notice, but then again, I don't hear "graph-o" very often in the wild either (I hear "thinko" more often, and even that crops up a couple orders of magnitude less often than "typo"). When I was first searching for a word for that phenomenon (I forget how long ago), I came up with "manu-o" on my own (though I wasn't really satisfied with it) before bumping into "graph-o".

It would be interesting to sort our where each term (or none) is used. My wild-ass guess is that regardless of the geographical or interest-community distribution of each word, using a single word with that meaning is primarily a geek thing. It took me surprisingly long to work out a more formal phrase to use -- "transcription error". I'm not sure whether that's because of my being hackish, or my currently being sleep-deprived.
geekosaur: orange tabby with head canted 90 degrees, giving impression of "maybe it'll make more sense if I look at it this way?" (Default)
posted by [personal profile] geekosaur at 10:29pm on 2008-04-17
Hm, could it also involve false Roman-alphabet digraphs? ("ei" specifically. It's a pity the diæresis has more or less dropped out of use in English).

Links

January

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24
 
25
 
26
 
27
 
28
 
29
 
30
 
31