18 Feb
The human brain is pretty amazing: Who needs ‘Leetspeak’?
While setting up an installation of Joomla! this evening, I found this very interesting bit of default ‘filler’ content:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Pretty clever. Who needs 13375p34k when you can cryptically convey meaning by simply jumbling your letters?
Hah! That’s pretty cool! I wonder how long it took you to write that
Also, we need to get lunch or something soon, I’ll drop you an email.
February 18th, 2007 at 1:13 amThis was making its way around the net some years ago and, if I recall correctly, was devised to test how quickly the message spread across the net rather than as a serious investigation of how important consistent spelling was for comprehension. Within a day, variants were posted that were not readily comprehensible because they used words that were longer and less common than those used in the original.
LTM
February 18th, 2007 at 10:20 amYeah, I thought I’d seen this posted a while ago.
I had considered describing situations where jumbled text would not work, i.e. longer words, phone numbers, addresses, statistical data, etc., but decided just to focus on the fact this approach even works at all.
I think there is also an interesting point to be made regarding information architecture - that some information is generic and much of its value comes from relative context, while other information is specific and very much dependent upon an exact sequence of bits.
February 18th, 2007 at 5:24 pm