A new low-water mark in my erroneous ways: my 10/19/24 posting “striking language” actually appeared on this blog with a, um, striking typo in its third word, the surname of my old friend and colleague Ellen Kaisse (as I type it now, letter by letter, very slowly, so as to get it right on the first try; my rough drafts are veritable forests of typos, the product of seriously disabled fingers working at the speed of my thoughts). What my readers saw when this posting first appeared:
From Ellen Kaiise in e-mail to me
One of my typo specialties, the misplaced geminate (more on misplaced gemination below). What’s new about this example is that I failed to notice it through at least five passes of editing. And just now, when I looked at the stretch of text above, I had a moment when I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Presumably because the spelling wouldn’t affect the pronunciation in English: Kaise, Kaisse, Kaiise, Kaiisse, they’d all be pronounced /kes/. Compare this to the examples gogling, goggling, googling, googgling; in real life, again from my hand, the second of these occurred as a typo for the third, and the first two would be pronounced differently from the last two, so the error leaps out from the page.
From earlier postings on this blog. About misplaced gemination. Which I now note could be seen as the metathesis of gemination as a property of segments: geminate switches places with simple.
— from my 12/14/14 posting “fagoot”, on FAGOOT as an error for FAGGOT:
misplacement of gemination in spelling is actually a pretty common typo from practiced and assured spellers. Like me.
These misplacements arise from a glitch in realizing a plan in language production. Gemination is part of a high-level plan in writing or typing, and a geminate can then be produced too early (as in my very frequent typo of REFFERED for REFERRED) or too late (as in FAGOOT). Some more examples from my writing:
AMZ to ADS-L 6/23/09: goggling [for googling] on “sceince” can be a sobering experience. [late geminate]
AMZ typed 7/10/10: fottballs for footballs [late geminate]
AMZ wrote 10/3/12: How far is the Old Logg [Logg crossed out and replaced] … Log Inn? [early geminate]
(All four of my examples discussed in “Planning at an abstract level” of 10/4/12.)
I am by no means an uncertain speller, but I produce a lot of typos when I write or type fast.
In addition to the geminate-first (early geminate) vs. geminate-last (late geminate) property of the error, the errors can be usefully classified as involving adjacent segments (as in FAGOOT for FAGGOT) or separated segments (as in REFFERED for REFERRED). Misplacement of separated geminates seems largely confined to letters representing similar segment types in parallel positions in the syllable (syllable-nucleus vowels, syllable-coda consonants. This is parallel to phonological metatheses.
In any case, misplacement of gemination is a typo, but not literally an error in the action of the fingers, though action errors are quite common: omitting a keystroke, doubling one, inserting keyboard-adjacent letters along with the intended target, hitting a keyboard-adjacent letter instead of the intended target. But misplacement of gemination is an error at a higher level, in the planning of finger actions. But still, in the examples in this posting, a typo.
Of course, omitting a letter, failing to double one, doubling one, and so on can also happen as errors of knowledge rather than typos: people can hold false beliefs about how certain words are spelled. And so they spell them wrong. It took me some time to learn that the spelling was HARASS, not HARRASS, EXHILARATING not EXHILIRATING, and more. As a child, that it was FORTY and not FOURTY (despite FOURTEEN), SPIGOT and not SPICKET (despite my pronunciation with a /k/), and more. These errors were not typos of any kind, but the product of mistaken beliefs.
— in my 10/13/18 posting “Chic peas and more”, the misplacement CIPPOLINI for CIPOLLINI: early geminate, separated (involving letters representing syllable-onset consonants).
— in my 7/21/24 posting “From the annals of error: the spelling ATMIDDEDLY” for ADMITTEDLY, which is delightfully complex. The error is, first of all, a (distant) metathesis of the consonant letters T and D; but gemination doesn’t move with consonants, but maintains its position, once again functioning as a property of its own.
October 21, 2024 at 5:03 pm |
For me, typing “We now know” means I have to slow down, or it comes out backward.
October 22, 2024 at 6:20 am |
Although, in that instance, the meaning is pretty much the same, with perhaps a slight difference in emphasis.