5 ms·
I know a spelling corrector is not the same thing as a spelling checker, but this is too good an opportunity to pass to promote Martha Snow's hilarious poem 'Sp
by lb1lf 9y ago
I know a spelling corrector is not the same thing as a spelling checker, but this is too good an opportunity to pass to promote Martha Snow's hilarious poem 'Spell Chequer':
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
- madacoo 9y agoThanks for sharing this. I found it difficult to parse the initial couple of lines because I was constantly attempting to read by attaching meaning to the spellings: "Eye halve" is a bit frightening in that sense. But then I realised I can read the text as sounds and almost ignore the spellings. Listening to what the sounds made in my head allowed for a much faster pace of comprehension because I didn't have to keep correcting myself. This poem demonstrated for me that it is possible to read and listen simultaneously, and that I don't usually do that. It seems that it would probably add to the experience of other poems to read them in this manner.
- rplnt 9y agoOne part I can't "translate" is this: It plainly marques four my revue
- mikepurvis 9y ago"It plainly marks for my review"
- adamsea 9y agoIt does! A lot, imho.
- scott_s 9y agoI think this is how all poems should be read, and I didn't realize until just now that I automatically did that.
- astine 9y agoThere is apparently a big divide between people who subvocalize when they read and those who don't. Those who don't tend to read much faster than those who do which is why speedreading techniques tend to focus on eliminated subvocalization. The problem is that people who subvocalize tend to need to do so in order to understand the text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
- scott_s 9y agoThanks for the term - I think I typically don't subvocalize, but I do when I read poems.
- derefr 9y agoI wonder whether the people who do subvocalize when they read tend to be better at writing poetry (or songwriting, or just writing beautiful prose.) I would expect that they'd have been subconsciously training themselves to the "feel" of good meter.
- earenndil 9y agoThere might be a correlation, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule. I've been told that my prose -- and poetry -- is good, and I definitely don't subvocalize.
- rplnt 9y agoMy chequer marks chequer as wrong.
- taneq 9y agoDamn spellcheck reverting to "English (US)".
- lcuff 9y agoA fun story in the same vein, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, by H.L. Chace, can be found here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/files/exhibits/ladle/ http://www.exploratorium.edu/files/exhibits/ladle/
- lurquer 9y agoCheck out the book "Tahoe Leap Eyeball" at Amazon. It's the entire KJV bible in that style. (Tahoe Leap Eyeball = The Holy Bible). Clearly the process was automated. Ingenious program. More complex than mere homophone substritution... it works syllable by phonetic syllable to string together words that, when spoken, sound pretty dang close to the original.
- abecedarius 9y agohttps://www.hyperborea.org/humor/tweeze.phtml https://www.hyperborea.org/humor/tweeze.phtml was done mostly by computer. It's a fun challenge to write your program to make these. To tie it back to the OP, you could "spell-correct" the source text into a sequence of words that come closest to reproducing the original sound (but with the source sequence blacklisted).
- dahart 9y agoI'm learning a little Icelandic right now, and it's eerie how similar reading this poem feels. The words make no sense at first glance, but there are sounds and a language I understand somewhere underneath.
- derefr 9y agoObligatory party-pooping: this doesn't really seem to be a poem about a spelling checker or corrector. Naive spelling [auto]correctors correct by text distance, because people almost always make mistakes in text input by typing the right words but making the wrong motions to do so. Slightly-less-naive autocorrect takes this approach further, and understands that e.g. "yjr" should become "the" because it's the same letters all shifted over by one. And, as in the submitted article, the best autocorrectors just look at the whole sentence context and try to predict what word the input "should" have been given what it looks like—this is essentially a kind of compressed sensing (like fMRIs use!), though in practice it tends to be baked down to something like markov chains of levenstein automata with back-propagation on w>n. ...whereas this poem is more like the result of a very naive speech to text algorithm, one which parses each word independently without the context of the sentence-so-far. (Side-note: I'm surprised that speech-to-text algorithms still work mostly in "real time" with only a limited buffer, unable to go back and change anything more than a few words in the past. It's why they fail to recognize names, for example. If speech-to-text algorithms would buffer the entire audio stream for a dictated document, showing an estimate of the output text so far, but continuing to re-estimate the entire document after every word/sentence/paragraph, they'd perform much better. The difference would be on the level of a standard web-renderer's line-at-a-time reflow algorithm, vs. TeX's whole-document reflow.)
- alejohausner 9y agoI typed the poem in to MS Word, and the only word flagged was 'chequer'. I guess Word's is a 'naive' spelling checker.
- chipotle_coyote 9y agoObligatory "Well Actually": the poem isn't trying to demonstrate the technology behind spellcheckers (or correctors). It's demonstrating a near-universal weakness of algorithmic checking/correcting that isn't shared with human proofreaders: when the mistaken word is the correct spelling of another word. The poem takes this to absurd extremes, but it's quite possible to make such mistakes through typos (e.g., "pun" instead of "pin").
- Someone 9y agoJudging by how the iOS speech synthesizer pronounces them, that is a lot better than “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” and “Tweeze Denied Beef Worker Isthmus” (both mentioned in comments to the post mentioning “Spell Chequer”)