Weird typo

Back in the day, we used to talk about strange typos and tried to figure out how they happened.

Here's a good one.

I typed the following sentence:

Once that one foodstuff you said everybody likes to consume but is hard to resist and is not good for us?

When I proofed the note and saw what I had written, I was flummoxed because what I wanted to write was this:

What's that one foodstuff you said everybody likes to consume but is hard to resist and is not good for us?

What happened between my brain and my fingers that caused the first word to come out that way?

"what's" –> "once"

Rereading the sentence, there are other parts that I would rewrite now, but that's a matter of composition and grammar, not typing mistakes.

For me, the causation of such mysterious typographical errors is not just a matter of sloth or clumsiness.  Since they often come out in ways that are superficially intelligible but logically and grammatically impossible, I believe that intelligently studied, they might be able to tell us something significant about the way the brain and neuro-muscular system work.

Consequently, I shall continue to keep my eyes on such mystifying typographical errors in hopes that they will reveal important data about the way the human brain and language faculty function.

 

Selected readings

• "The weirdness of typing errors" (3/14/22)
• "Excepted for publication" (7/30/21)
• "Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20)
• "'One I first saw': more on homophonically induced typing errors" (4/8/20)
• Two types of 'errors' (again) and it's all 'grammar' (again)" (3/14/05)
• "A Cupertino of the mind" (5/22/08)
• "withe" (12/14/08)
• "What is it, Lassie?": (8/4/09)
• "The birth and death of typos" (3/17/12)
• "What the fingers want" (7/30/15)
• "So borrowing and meaningless" (5/27/20)
• "Delete / elite button" (6/22/21)
• "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue" (3/4/18)
• "'Evil being protesting'" (6/27/18)
• "An odd error" (9/24/19)
• "Massive miswriting" (7/25/18)
• "Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)
• "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
• "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
• "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
• "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': SPP turns 300" (7/20/20)