Now that the eyebrows have settled . . .

I keep documenting these influence-of-adjacent-lines reading errors because I think they're interesting, and because I at least seem to make them all the time. This one is unusual because one line influenced another across a sizable gap:

I at first misread this as "But no sooner had eyebrows gotten settled," which I thought was funny and a bit poetic. Something that causes a stir is said to "raise eyebrows," but after a few minutes the eyebrows have mostly settled down again. The beginning of everyone is visually similar to the beginning of eyebrows, and I suppose the string row, together with the ascender from the final letter of solid, must have dropped down from the line above.

Of course as soon as I got to quiet my realized the error and automatically reprocessed the sentence. These errors always last just a fraction of a second, just barely long enough to ping consciousness. I assume many more of them arise and are rectified without ever breaking the surface of the unconscious, but that they may still have some subliminal effect. I wonder if they are in any way predictable -- if, for instance, any significant percentage of readers would make this particular error when reading this particular text. Hard to know, assuming most readers never become conscious of the vast majority of such split-second misreadings.

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Update (November 28): The screenshot above is from p. 57 of Eleanor Cameron's A Mystery for Mr. Bass. Today I read this on p. 126 of the same work:

"Would this be the Topman residence?" inquired the little man in soft, musical tones, his thick, standing-out eyebrows going right up. At the same time all the other pairs of eyebrows went up.

Now Annabelle Topman came forward.

"I am Mrs. Topman," she said. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"Mistress Topman," he returned politely, and his eyebrows came down again, . . .

So that's weird enough that I guess I have to add subconscious precognition to the list of possible factors causing my misreading. How often does a book bother to mention raised eyebrows coming back down? And what are the odds that it would be this book, the same one that occasioned the misreading about eyebrows settling? A word search shows that the novel's first mention of eyebrows (lifted but not lowered) is on p. 104, so my misreading on p. 57 was not influenced by anything I had already read.

I suppose one non-paranormal explanation would be that the author subconsciously misread her own manuscript in the same way I would later do, and that this ghost text about eyebrows settling planted a seed which found expression later in the text. This seems highly unlikely, though, since the line breaks in the manuscript would be very unlikely to correspond to those on my phone's Kindle app.