A question for pedants - what has happened to the "double el"

Excellent trisher.

Any more of the same? Please.

Ah the old ones are the best aren't they, Trisher?
November 2011 and 2010 I believe (both times by Gracesmum )
But as I say again and again, if a thing is worth saying it is worth saying thrice twice

An interesting thread.

You might like this:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at
Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a
wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the
first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a
taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This
is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?

Ex-teachers will have had plenty of practice at this verbal form of the old Eric Morecambe/Andre Previn joke about playing the "right notes, but not necessarily in the right order."
Spellcheckers have their place as long as you are aware of American/English variations, but predictive texting on iPads can come up with some weird and wonderful suggestions.
Nothing beats the" human eye " though.

Oh dear, not the 'Cambridge Research' meme again!

It's not 'Cambridge research' and we don't read words as 'wholes', we just think we do because our brains process them so fast that we're not aware of processing individual letters. In fact, there is a whole body of genuine research which shows that we do just that.

If it didn't matter about letter order in words what would we do with words such as dairy/diary, trail/trail where the transposition of just two letters gives us completely different words with completely different meanings?

As an ex-remedial reading tutor this meme drives me crazy

Isn't that how experienced readers read though?

It's not how skilled readers read (and believe me, there is a difference between 'experienced' and 'skilled').

As I said before, it seems to us as if we are reading words as 'wholes' because we are experiencing the end result of brain processing which takes milliseconds. It's not conscious, as it would be with a child learning to read who sounds out and blends the graphemes in the word, because we are highly practised at it (though what happens when you meet a completely unfamiliar word?). But the brain starts the word identification process by identifying the letters in the word. If you think about it logically there is nothing else it can do. If it worked by word shape alone you'd soon be in trouble!

The reason people can read the silly meme is that the words are all very short; they're familiar and they can be easily worked out as anagrams. It doesn't work with more complex words.

Here's an explanation of it:

www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

P.S I was, though, very startled on another message forum when someone said they'd tried it out on a friend who was a medic and they didn't notice there was anything wrong with it..

P.P.S The meme has been doing the rounds for years; I've had a bookmarked link to the explanation for about 10 years

fascinating - the whole thread I mean,

Janerowena - I too noticed and was irritated by 'nucular'. I think it may come from US military usage, along with 'negatory'.

Grannyknot - I often am defeated by attempts to reproduce posters' names on Gransnet. My iPad knows better and sabotages my efforts to get them right. A very quick double click, or accepting an unwanted full stop, seem to help. Anyone have a remedy for this or is it just me?