On Teh, Adn and Other Tpyos

Hnoestly!

I am a bad typist — inaccurate, and constantly having to go back to correct typos.

However, I do touch type, am reasonably fast when I’m flowing, and sometimes manage to discipline myself so the mistakes come less often.

For the rest of this entry, I’m goign to leave all the typos in.

(That first one wasn’t deliberate, I swwear.)

(Although it was quite well timed.)

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I’ve strated to wonder whether all the incidental and accidentals of how I write aren’t, in ways I don’t fully understand, part of it.

For example, with my handwriting, I have always been dismayed that I am unable to write the same letter the same way twice.

At school, I was told off from the age of five for having ‘messy handwriting’.

But I now realise this was down to the fact that I’m physically incapable of repeating a gesture with any precision (dance move, tennis stroke), and that I’m also mentally incabpable of repeating a sentence or thought.

This isn’t special pleading. Hey, look, I”m so inevitably creative, guys. I sincerely wish I could get on top of this skill. Just as I wish I could type really flawlessly at the same time as styping really really fast.

90-100 wpm would be fine by me.

For years, as I grew up, it made me — it shamed me, in secret: my failure to write neatly.

(I realise I am automaitically correcyting typos, and am having to reinstate them — slightly artificially — once the word is finished.)

I learned to touch type in my eraly twenties, when I began working for a company called ITFC.

We were based in a large industrial unit, just south of the Hanger Lane gyratory.

ITFC provided subtitles for ITV and Channel 5 programmes.

Another time, I’ll write about working there. (I lea4rned a lot.) For now, I’ll just say that my workdays of nine and a half hours involved typing and retyping the words in small caption boxes.

It was Twitter avant la letter. Or before the 140 characters.

Our job was to fit the gist of whatever the on-screen speaker (Bruce Forsyth or Sergeant June Ackland or Robbie Coltrane or Dangermouse) said into one or two lines of text.

Never three.

Before starting the job, I had decided that I’d touch rather than finger type. I bought a Teach Yourself Typing manual, and never let myself look down at my fingers again — even though I’d become a really fast two-finter typist, and had completed four unpublished novels that way.

The trick I learned then, which was — I was told — a bad thing to do, was slowly to load up the ITFC computer’s basic version of autocorrect with my habitual typos. Hence, teh, adn, do’nt, acn, abuot, ebcause, feelign, and watn — all of these went into the bank of spellings to be authomatically replaced.

A while ago, my version of Autocorrect in Word was maxed out. It’s memory had become full, and would no longer accept new entires. HOwever, when i tried it just now, it worked.

If back then I had wanted to becmoe a better tyupist, typing for typing’s sake, I would have forced myself to unlearn adn and teh.

As it is, typing was a tool — and K just wanted to get the words down, and accurate, as quickly as possible.

That hasn’t changed. But as with everyuthing else that forces me to go back to sentences, rather than flashing through them thoughtlessly, I now wonder if typos aren’t a way I make language a bit more gnarly for myself.

Howeer much I’d like to be as flawless as a dot matrix printer, chuntering out letter by letter, word by correctly spelled word, I’m — as my page constantly lets me know — a stumbler, a tripper, a faller-on-my-face.

I’ m relentlessly humanly klutzy.

If I want to appear elegent, I have to go back and correct and correct and correct.

And I suppose in some ways I’m glad.

(But I’m still going to try and improve.)

[Image credit for sharing: Machina Speculatrix.]