A friend sent me this on ICQ. I don't like spelling mistakes as they make the text more annoying to read. But I was surprised at how readable this was:



Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

WOW! Now if only AOLers could get that down...

Reading that is a *little* slower than reading normal text, but it's pretty close!

yes, although a bit slower...I was suprised at how simple that was.

aamizng, I msut say.

oh sanp, taht was smoe carzy suftf ginog on tehre.

yeah using AOL Instant Messenger teaches you to read stuff like that better than reading normal text, you get so used to reading mistakes, that it actually takes you longer to read something in proper English...

Found on Slashdot:
[quote]Follow-up: Can You Raed Tihs? meal worms writes "A Slashdot article appearing last Monday, which reported on the claim that scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place, was circulated to the University of British Columbia's Linguistics department. An interesting counter-example resulted:

"Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr."
As demonstrated, a simple inversion of the internal characters results in a text which is relatively hard to decipher."[/quote]

I read it all with only a few times I had to stop and try and figure out what it said