Sometimes reading one to three lines of text at once (scanning and “absorbing” is how I tend to think of it) isn’t really as fast as it might seem. Recently, I had to back up and “re-read” (mentally review) “mixed martial artist” which I had “read” as “mixed martini artist”.
*heh*
How I scanned those two letters as “ni” instead of “al” I really don’t know. The occurrence gives me a little more reason to exercise patience with OCR software, though. In my case, though, I’m blaming coffee deprivation.
At times, though, it’s just not my fault that my reading simply MUSt slow down. *heh* Take for example the inexcusable,
“…those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them.”
Oh, heck, “those interactions” apparently even “surpass… the human brains [sic] ability” to write about them grammatically. *heh* If the author of that ungrammatical comment isn’t able to comprehend the possessive form “brain’s” (and whatever editor might have passed that abortion of English doesn’t even have brains enough to correct it), then I just have to slow down and gripe about the stupidity and poor ethics it reveals. “[P]oor ethics”? Yeh, the author of that comment accepted payment for furthering illiteracy. Evil troglodyte. *heh*
(Worse, the moronic thief–yes, “thief” for taking pay to utter crap–repeated nearly the same ingrammatical crap with, “The world’s complexity may simply outrun our brains [sic] capacity to understand it.” There, the proper formulation ought rightly to have been “brains'”.)
But, of course, this sort of stupidity is common among our “betters” who presume to be able to tell us how to think. To show I’m evenhanded, I’ll even class the WSJ’s James Taranto as among the stupid bright people. Take this Taranto’s piece of stupidity as an example:
“Understand, I don’t want the Obama’s [sic] $81 steaks.”
In an otherwise fairly on target piece about Dhimmicrappic hypocrisy, Taranto loses sight of how to create a possessive form of a plural. Since he was referring to the Obamas (The Zero and Moochelle), what any literate person would have written in his place would have been “Obamas'” with the apostrophe following the plural “s”. Some might have written “Obamas’s” although that formation is non-standard. As Taranto wrote it (and his lazy, subliterate editor(s) approved) he refers to ONE “Obama” (THE) and makes of the ONE “Obama” a possessive referencing the $81 steaks (big appetite for ONE Obama, but then we knew the Obamas have big appetites, for various things).
Gripes me off that people like that don’t have their pay docked for doing such things.