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> He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with. I _still
by bigiain 6y ago
> He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with.
I _still_ do something very like this in my 50s. Words that my subconscious brain decides "don't matter", usually irregular character or place names in fiction, just become some kind of signifier in my memory so I recognise what they mean in the context of the story - but when I discuss that book with someone else they'll speak out loud one of those words and I'll have to take a few seconds to "reverse-phonics" it into a sequence of letters then visualise that in my head to work out which "signifier" (that I'd never bothered creating an audible form for) there talking about...
- tdeck 6y agoI have the same experience. Often I have some complete mispronunciation in my head because I never bothered to look carefully at the character name.
- blt 6y agoI participated in MetaFilter for years before I went to any meetup. At my first meetup, I realized I had never thought about how to pronounce the nickname "MeFi" despite reading and typing it countless times.
- karatinversion 6y agoI remember doing this with a play I read for a class back in high school. When I was taking the test on it, I realized to my horror that I didn't know the name of one of the main characters – it started with a distinctive letter, so that was all my brain had kept.