Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I read in the Bible that God loves the Beatles ..." [pause for audience reaction] "Well it says, 'He so loved the world...,' and that covers a lot of people." -- Phil Keaggy, introducing his rendition of "Here Comes The Sun" [I heard this 2007-04-28; I don't know whether it's part of his stock patter or he came up with it that night -- DGA]

My brain frequently tries to "correct" what I'm reading, trying to compensate for the frequent tpyos, mispeellings, and folks who yews a homonym that their spell-checker can't catch; often it fills in the right things, but sometimes it's just trying to race ahead of tired eyes making predictions.

This morning I just caught an interesting quirk: when reading the phrase "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", I read 'liberty' just fine, got halfway through 'equality', saw the 'Fra' coming up beyond what I'd already focussed on, and mentally "corrected" 'equality' to 'égalité', was confused when 'fraternity' had a 'y' on the end, and had to backtrack to verify that 'liberty' did in fact end in 'y' instead of 'é'.

Now all of this happened at my normal (fairly fast) reading speed, which means it took a lot of after-the-fact analysis and some experimenting to piece together the events outlined in the preceeding paragraph. An important clue was how trying to hear the sounds of the words as I read them or to read them aloud, "liberty, equality" was easy if I was careful not to look at the next word, but if I let my eye slide over there it became a struggle not to read "equality" but hear/say "égalité" and feel as though the "liberty" before it had been an error to be corrected by backing up and starting over with "liberté" (though I suppose one could fudge a pronounciation halfway between the two).

Either this is an interesting bit of wiring in my brain, or my allergies and attendant headache are affecting me even more than I'd thought this morning. Note that while the motto, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" does occasionally pop into my head at odd intervals, the only time I've had really intense repeated exposure to the phrase was in 10^th-grade European History class *mumble* years ago. It's not like I've spent a lot of time since then handling French currency or reading essays and books on modern French history, or listening to French rhetoric (I've no idea how often the phrase comes up in speeches, but I know how often "liberty" and "liberty and justice" show up in US speeches). ... Then again, there are various random phrases that are as likely (or more likely) to pop out of my mouth in French or Greek than in English despite my being almost barely at a "conversational with lots of pointing and shrugging" level in French and not even that good with Greek.

In case anyone's curious, I tripped over the phrase in question in "Washington diary: Land of ideas" (How different might our lives look if the US had never been founded?), which filkerdave linked to.