Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Every once in a while, out of the blue, a common, everyday word will suddenly look…wrong.

This has happened all my reading/writing life. I actually remember the first time this happened. I was in 5th grade, and I was reading along and came across the word “dirt.” I stared at that word for a while; I knew what it was, and I knew what it meant, but I was sure it was misspelled. I even went to the dictionary and looked it up. “Dirt” had become, suddenly, foreign English.

It doesn’t happen frequently—perhaps three or four times a year—but it has always puzzled me. Today, it happened again, but with a new twist.

Today, I was writing an email, tutoring someone on SQL basics. In checking my facts, I came across a snippet of code.

SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE . . .

That word, SELECT, just looked wrong. Did it really end with “CT”? Does any other word end with “CT”? I typed it out myself, and it looked fine. Here’s the deal: It only looked wrong in Courier font, all caps.

Now why would my brain suddenly reject (Hey! another word ending in “CT”!)—Why would my brain suddenly elect to reject (I’m going to have fun with this, now) the word “SELECT” as suspect? (Okay…I’ll stop.) And why only in Courier? And why does it look fine, now?

Some form of super-limited aphasia? Perhaps a pathway neuron that hooked to my recognition of “SELECT” suddenly died, and it took me an hour or so to reroute back to that brain-byte.

The brain is a mystifying thing. It does things we don’t understand, sometimes seemingly without reason.

I’ll never know. I only hope it isn’t just me… That would be weird.

k