Mar 5, 2015

Can you spot the
the mistake here?

When I was kid, one of my favorite books was Optricks by Melinda Wentzell and D.K. Holland. It was full of bold, immersive, classic optical illusions, just about all of which you can now find online. Among these was the one that you see in the title of this post—did you spot the the mistake? That's it: "the" appears twice consecutively, but many people don't notice because the repeat word is on either side of a line break. It's also an article, a tiny, auxiliary part of speech that, in print, the brain tends to gloss over more than, say, a flamboyantly flourished adverb.
As a somewhat know-it-allish kid, I scoffed at this trick of text, preferring Escher's drawings of monks endlessly walking along tesseract-shaped staircases. It seemed like once you you knew it, you'd never be caught off guard with the old double-the gag.  And then, something started to happen to my my brain-eye connection. I'm not sure when when exactly, but these double word optical tricks began appearing in my own writing with with greater frequency. While very little has has changed about the way I sound when when speaking, my written words appear as as the print equivalent to a stutter. Now it has has gotten to the point where I cannot write write without needing a proofreader's help—if if you've read this blog, you already know know that.  Guess it serves me right for having been such a know-it-allish kid. But what about you? Without looking over this post, how many pairs of consecutively repeated words did you you spot? Let me know in the comments below.

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