Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 170
Featured commentary
When words look weird — you’ve got OI
D
id you ever have one of those
days when you wrote or
typed a very familiar word
and it just looked alien?
The word seems to writhe on the
page like a snake that slithered in
there to poison your sentence.
So you check the spelling of the
word, and are assured it is OK, and
check the meaning, which works for
the thought you were trying to express
— and then you toss the whole
experience off to some sort of reverse
déjà vu and get on with your day.
Well, you do.
I, on the other hand, might chew
on this ponderous issue for an entire
afternoon. And, actually, I did.
In so doing, I researched the topic
and learned, first, that there is a field
of study called psycholinguistics
(which, I assume, is populated
by psycholinguists, such as me).
Beyond that, I found out that the
opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu,
“the phenomenon of experiencing a
situation that one recognizes but that,
nonetheless, seems very unfamiliar.”
Well, jamais vu or Alzheimer’s, it’s
your call.
akin to Old High German
Jim English
(zunga) and Latin (lingua). If you
that many cooks working on any
WALKER get
recipe, it’s going to cause problems.
DON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY
But the only term I found that
is word/spelling-specific for this
“it seems weird” phenomenon is
“orthographic incredulity” (OI) —
which I just love the sound of. And
the acronym works as a word, itself,
as in “OI, OI does that word seem so
strange?”
So here are my top six reasons that
words look weird:
Reason No. 1 — They are weird.
Take, for instance, the word
“tongue.” This one always looks
weird to me. It really should be
spelled “tung,” and all the rest is
sleight of hand that, if you let it
happen, would sound something like
“tun-gee-u-way.”
Upon researching the origin of the
word, this all makes sense because,
though it appears to be a French
conspiracy, apparently, this word was
Middle English (tunge), from Old
And, beyond that, it was probably
first written by some quill-wielding
monk who needed to stretch out
the word to fill a line in some old
parchment tome. So he tossed in
extra letters as art.
Reason No. 2 — You looked at it
too long.
If you stare at anything long
enough, it begins to shimmy. This is
no less true with thin lines on a page.
Try staring at any of these words for
awhile:
sequence
rhythm
restaurant
language
They soon appear to have too
many letters, or at least some in the
wrong places.
But the studiers of these things
have come up with another reason for
the phenomenon, called “semantic
satiation” or “semantic saturation,”
a “phenomenon in which repetition
(or staring at it too long) causes a
word or phrase to temporarily lose
meaning.”
Reason No. 3 — It’s your
handwriting.
Personally, my cursive writing
has gotten so sloppy that any word I
write in cursive looks like it got wet.
But even the perfectly written cursive
goes south when you use the capital
letters D (which goes backwards at
the top), G (which looks like S with
a tumor) or T (which looks like some
kind of JT to me).
Reason No. 4 — It reads (sounds)
like something else.
Take for instance, the word
“absquatulate.” If someone said that
to me, my first reaction would be
to say, “You do, and you’ll clean it
up.” And though the word begs to
mean some sort of exercise routine, it
actually means “to leave, in a hurry,
under suspicious circumstances.”
Reason No. 5 — Chemical
imbalance.
Your imbibitions of libations (or
lack of sleep) of the night before have
shorted out a few circuits. Drink
some water and take a nap and then
look at the word again.
Reason No. 6 — Emotional
loading.
Depending on the circumstances,
seemingly benign words can take
on hostile connotations that will
make them shake on the page like
a sidewinder’s rattle. Consider
“mother-in-law,” “procedure” or
“pregnant.”
And, finally, we close with a
famous quote, which should make all
us psycholinguists and weird-wordsufferers feel better.
“All my life I’ve looked at words
as though I were seeing them for the
first time.” — Ernest Hemingway
Now, I’m sure old Ernie meant
that in a much more profound sense
than I use it here but, you know, it
makes me feel better to think I have
something in common with a, well, a
really good writer.
Comment at jwalker@
the-signal.com or Twitter at
DontTakeMeSeriously.
