This is, as I guess is obvious, from a grammar book for students of English as a second language. The sentences are all wrong and are meant to be corrected, which perhaps increases the chance that they will be automatically "corrected" by the brain of a native speaker. When I first glanced at the first numbered sentence, I misread it as "She is a well-endowed figure skater" -- and I think the interpolated word came from the line below, where, just below "well figure," we find "the lower." This is visually very similar to "endowed." The string "owe" is identical, the "l" resembles the ascender from "d," and before that is an "e." The fact that both "well" and "lower" are underlined probably contributed to my brain's combining them. The semantic influence of the word "figure" may also have played a role, since "full-figured" is a similar euphemism to "well-endowed."
Every time I experience one of these errors, I think I should try to design a text that would evoke specific such errors on purpose, a sort of subliminal messaging. I'm not sure if the effect could be induced at all reliably, though; besides the visual features of the text itself, there is also a "Freudian" element in play which would presumably vary from reader to reader.
1 comment:
In a sense, something like this has been done. Rock songs that are song without being clearlyl articulated so that other words are heard to what the lyrics are or that the words are not even heard properly and where this is part of the effect of the song.
In writing, this might work well for a short poem like a haiku. I wonder if similar effects are observed in Chinese with characters from one line influencing another.
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