Say What?

The older I get, the more I find myself thinking: “Say what?” Sometimes it’s because I read something incorrectly. Other times I heard it wrong. I think I suffer from audio-dyslexia. Pieces get switched around and what I hear bears very little resemblance to what was said. Still other times it’s not my fault. People just say and write the most bizarre things.

My audio-dyslexia manifests itself several ways. Sometimes I flip vowels. Sometimes I flip consonants. Sometimes I flip entire syllables. I’ll even insert or eliminate letters altogether. More often I just plain mishear.

I had lunch out with friends yesterday. The husband wondered what was in the prime rib omelet. “What an odd combination,” thought I. Actually not so odd, because he was looking at a fine herbs omelet. Let me explain how this works. My brain audioed an almost-rhyming “prime” for “fine.” Then it audio-dyslexia switched the “e” and the “r” in herb (the “h” was silent), giving “reb,” which became “rib.” Really quite logical, for a brain gone haywire.

My husband (whose store is near several colleges) told me the other day, “The students are back.” To which I replied, “You glued your aunt’s black what?” Here we have another principle operating, that of inserting audio word-breaks where they don’t belong. So, his statement sounded to me like: “Stud (long “u”) ents black (inserting an errant “l”). You can take it from here. By the way, I never met any of his aunts; they were all deceased long before we married. Go figure.

My visual dyslexia is rather like the autocomplete on a computer, only my brain is doing it as I’m reading. For example, there was an ad in the right margin of my email screen recently with the query: Mortgage Underwear? “Say what?” I asked myself. Turns out it said: Mortgage Underwater? My visual dyslexia switched the “a” and the “e” in "water" and deleted the “t” for good measure.

Swapping out vowels in words I read seems to be one of my more regular visual problems. I was reading a map of North Carolina and chortled when I saw the town of “Old Fart.” I know a lot of people retire to North Carolina, but did they have to name a town after these “old farts?” Turns out, no they didn’t. The town is actually Old Fort.

One category that can be counted on to provide fodder for the “Say What?” list is email subjects, especially those that are spam. Take for instance one I received a few weeks ago, titled: “Be the man you used to be.” Newsflash: Despite those who will swear I have a pair of brass ones, I never was a man. Besides, time marches on. There’s no way I could ever be the woman I used to be. I could aspire to be the woman I’d like to be. Or to be like the woman I used to be. But technically, I think, not ever to be the woman I used to be.

I’ve seen some other things online that drove me to a “Say What” that might be typos. Or they might actually be Freudian slips. First there was “athlettes.” A typo? Or a more delicate term for female athletes? You be the judge.

My favorite one of these is a recent Facebook item from a friend who encouraged us to share her post on our own pages, because it would bring us lots of money. She admitted that she didn’t know exactly how it worked, but it definitely had something to do with “the Chinese art of Fungus Shiue.”

After my initial “Say what?” I figured out she must have meant Feng Shui (which is pronounced Fung Shway). Too late. I kept picturing that poster people hang in their office. The one that reads: “I feel like a mushroom here. They keep me in the dark and feed me lots of bulls - - t.” I admit that I consulted a Feng Shui book before I put our house on the market (fat lot of good it did me), but most folks think it’s just a load of bs. So, Fungus Shiue might have been a Freudian slip after all.

The next time you hear me mutter: “Say what?” don’t think I didn’t hear you. I heard you perfectly clearly, as far as I was concerned. Just not necessarily the way you meant to be heard. If that bothers you, go fry a bike.

Retirement Issues — Auto-Incorrect

As each year passes, my typing skills deteriorate. I’m prone to lazy pinkies, wandering ring fingers and errant middle fingers. I can’t blame my eyesight, because I touch-type most of the time. I’d like to think it’s arthritis, but more likely I’m just getting clumsier.

Suddenly I’m interacting more with the autocorrect and autocomplete functions on my computer. Unfortunately, I’m finding them sadly lacking in the accuracy department. Why is it that my computer auto-completes things I don’t need it to, and in a way that I don’t want it to? And at the same time, it fails to auto-correct my most obvious errors?

For example, when I’m keying into the URL bar in my browser, one of my lazy fingers often types three “os” instead of two. Is it asking too much for the autocorrect to change “Faceboook” into “Facebook”? Apparently so. Today I learned it’s also too demanding to have “Facenook” auto-corrected to “Facebook.”

On the other hand, unwanted autocompletes can make just enough sense to leave people scratching their heads when they mean something quite different from what was intended. I recently keyed in “Many seniors have serious health problems,” but it showed up as “Many seniors have serious health prospects.”

I caught the error, but it left me wondering what my readers would have thought I meant by “health prospect.” At worst, the phrase conjures up the specter of an infomercial for some miracle potion being hawked on retro TV. At best, it smacks of a special discount for seniors at the local Y.

In addition to my individual fingering problems, I’m prone to finger dyslexia. That is, I sometimes get letters in a word out of sequence. This can be disconcerting. One of my email messages was supposed to read: “Angry Lebanese stormed government buildings.” Imagine my surprise to see that “Angry Lesbians stormed government buildings.” Thanks to my finger dyslexia, unwanted auto-complete had struck again.

Lately I’ve noticed that my typing dyslexia has spread to my verbal communication and I’m now prone to auto-complete in my speech. Or as I like to call it, auto-incorrect. Here’s just one example.

My husband and I were discussing the current political scene. I meant to say: “One of the ways to have a successful presidency…” but it came out “One of the ways to have a successful pregnancy…” He looked at me, panic stricken, as I stood there open-mouthed, trying to spit out what I really intended to say. When I finally corrected myself and said, “I mean, presidency,” he exhaled audibly.

It seems that I often say the first syllable of a word correctly, but then my brain-to-mouth connection gets interrupted. I go through a list of commonly used words that start with the same syllable, usually silently in my head. “Prosper, prospect...”

Sometimes I do this out loud, hoping that actually hearing the second syllable will somehow make the word I’m looking for come to me more easily. More likely, the “in depth property inspection” that I’m searching for will come out “in depth prostate inspection.” Try getting that image out of your head.

These auto-incorrects can be so ridiculous that I’ve started collecting them. They’re like mixed metaphors and mangled aphorisms. My husband has always been prone to those, but he has an excuse; English was not his native tongue. “A rolling stone sweeps clean” and “He was caught between a rock and a frying pan” are two of his classics.

“Angry Lesbians storming government buildings” probably won’t stand the test of time as well as Jagdish’s colorful misspeaks. Unfortunately, the “in depth prostate inspection” will probably be burned into my psyche for quite awhile.

Damn you, auto-incorrect!