Scrambling life

“Abso _ _ _ _ inglutely” – this is exactly what Dr. Cummings drew on our board on Thursday. What does it look like to you? Yup, that’s probably it. You knew pretty quickly, right? I did, too. Most of the people in our class did.

This made me think a little further about what that means – or what it signifies. Not the word itself, but the fact that most people would be able to fill it out in a few seconds. This experiment made me think back to a meme I’ve seen on Facebook a few times throughout the years:

It’s already pretty cool to consider that our brain can decipher a word like “Abso _ _ _ _ inglutely” when a big chunk of it’s middle is taken out, but I think it’s incredible to see that we can read an entire paragraph with all of the letters scrambled.

One interesting way to look at this is that everybody can see these words in a different way – literally speaking, their eyes will read them in a different way than we are. That’s another person’s reality. I had a friend with dyslexia who consistently reads words backwards – like one of the usernames on this blog, rolyat flow. Their eyes scientifically see the words differently, similar to de Saussaure’s scientific reasoning behind communication – semiology.

Research has actually been done – by Cambridge University nonetheless – on our mental capacity to see words put together this way (see http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/). This research stemmed from the Facebook meme, and confirmed it’s hypothesis that, as long as the first and last letter of a word were the same, most people would be able to understand it.

Moving forward with de Saussure’s psychological view on semiology, the idea that we only need two letters to understand a word could hint to the fact that we skim through words (and therefore through life). We worry about the beginning and the end, but the meat in between can still be all jumbled up.

The most important “sign” to me, though, connects this to another thing we discussed in class on Thursday: that ideology gets spread through language. This research, showcasing how we’re scientifically programmed to understand words even when they’re scrambled, also showcases that everybody can understand and interpret things differently than their intended structure or meaning.

My question stemming from this: Think about the most precise statement you could make. Is it possible to say anything so precise that everybody understands the same way? Is there any sign completely and unmistakably clear to everyone in the world?

Peace,

-UA191