Thursday, March 21, 2024

You're, like, reading that wrong.

For some time now I've been documenting instances of a common (for me) reading error in which text from an adjacent line interposes itself into the line I am reading. Yesterday I experienced two instances of this, both with like as the intruding word.

This past Monday (March 18), Bruce Charlton posted "Some aphorisms on How To Proceed from a baseline in materialistic modernity." This reminded me that he had briefly maintained an all-aphorism blog called "The Baron of Jesmond's Aphorisms," but when I tried to find it, I discovered that the Baron of Jesmond blog is now a set of lecture notes from a course on Abnormal Psychiatry and Psychology. The notes turned out to be pretty interesting, though, and I skimmed quite a bit. At around 11:00 yesterday morning I read this in the notes on the SSRI family of psychiatric drugs:


I at first read this as "Chemical structure -- likely derived from antihistamines" and found that a very odd thing to say. We're talking about manmade products of relatively recent vintage; why would we have to speculate about what their chemical structure was "likely" derived from? Then I noticed my error, corrected it, and moved on -- but not before taking a screenshot for documentation. The word like obviously intruded from the line below, and I think the -ly suffix may have come from the visually similar hy in Diphenhydramine in the line below that.

That night, I used a phone app to set an alarm before going to bed and saw this:


I read this as "If you like alarm bell ringtones, try like 8 more ringtones" -- which my half-asleep brain understood as a sarcastic commentary on the fact that I had set two alarms for the next morning: "Wow, you really like setting alarms. Why don't you set like eight more of them? In fact, since you love alarm bell ringtones so much, why don't you marry one?"

1 comment:

Bruce Charlton said...

I can't remember what I did with the B of J aphorisms' but maybe they were compiled here:

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/11/aphorism-or-what.html

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