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jasonkostempski comments on Common Errors in History - Less Wrong
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Comments (47)
You're hoping this "red" thing catches on, I presume? Because it's not otherwise saving anybody effort.
It actually costs effort for me, it interrupts my reading flow when I see an obvious spelling or grammatical error.
The theory that the read/read confusion is a major problem is based on an overly simplistic model of the way people read as well. Experiments have shown that people are capable of interpreting words based on contextual cues from later in the sentence - the brain is receiving visual information from words that come positionally later and uses it to resolve ambiguities while parsing text.
To add to what I said above, I know that it works for me, because when re-reading a post, I always find myself having to check back if there isn't much context. So I'm not sure I'm making a mistake about how people read, just reporting what goes on when I myself read.
The mistake is assuming that because it works for you it will work for others.
I think I'm unusually disrupted by spelling/grammatical errors. I find it extremely hard to read the occasional posts here that use e/em/eir or other gender neutral pronouns instead of he/him/his for example but I assume this is unusual as I haven't seen anyone else mention it. I find it sufficiently distracting that I will usually give up reading a post that does that.
I had no idea what was going on with e/em/eir. I have never seen them used anywhere else and thought there was some kind of inside joke on lesswrong, something like a play on the word atheist as a'th'ist, as in someone who doesn't believe in the letter combination 'th', or maybe a bad HTML parser trying to insert a th tag, because they seem to be used where the/them/their would be used. It was bugging me enough that I searched for [space]eir[space] and your comment was the first result to directly address it.
Spivak Pronouns if you have not yet been enlightened.
I get how it works now, anks.
Sorry, didn't realize I was unique in this regard. Obviously, I can infer the meaning from context too, but sometimes -- like at the beginning of the sentence, it takes a second to adjust. And sometimes context can't even disambiguate.
In contrast, if you see "red", you immediately think of the sound of the word "red", which jumps you straight into thinking of past tense. (Again, for me at least.) That's why every other verb like this works the same way (lead-led, breed-bred, etc.).
How about "readed"?
How about "have read"?
"Have read" is already a separate grammatical tense.
How about "did read", which is the same tense, but with excessive emphasis on the act?
You're the judge here; you tell me! Although FWIW, I don't see the point of merely reshuffling the ambiguity to a phrase or variation in emphasis that already exists.