One of the problems with similar, easily-confused words is that the more we rely on spell checkers, the more susceptible we are to mixing them up without noticing. Spell checkers at least notify you when you make a spelling mistake, and probably just fix it for you. But when you use a word — which is a legitimate word — when you meant to use another, spell checkers are useless because both choices are words, and the mistake is not in the spelling. At least, not exactly.
Here’s a pair of words that occasionally get mixed up: “viscous” and “vicious.” I think this is purely an issue of spelling; the meanings and the sounds are probably distinct enough that they’re seldom confused. “Viscous” (you pronounce the hard “c” in the middle, like “vis-kus”) means “thick and gooey”, like molasses. Vicious (“vish-us”) means nasty or cruel. So trapping somebody in a pool of viscous glue might be vicious, but you probably aren’t likely to find any nasty glue or sticky sadists.
The interesting thing about mixing up “viscous” and “vicious” is that it highlights an oddity of the way we read — most people, at least, visually skip over the middle of most words and understand each word from just the beginning and end, as well as from the context. There’s been a bit of research into this, originally by Kourosh Saberi and David Perrott. A 1999 letter to New Scientist (from Graham Rawlinson) illustrated the effect this way:
“This is easy to denmtrasote. In a puiltacibon of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi’s work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work.
The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
This was not easy to type!”
See? You probably didn’t even find that very difficult to read!
