Sometimes I'm proofreading a translation or looking back at an old blog post, and I'm shocked to discover that I typed "their" when I was supposed to use "there". WTF? I know the difference full well! Why did the wrong one come out of my fingers?
Of course, my thoughts then turned to dementia. I never made these mistakes when I was a kid in school! Am I losing my mind??
But in the shower this morning, I realized there's a major difference between what I'm doing now and what I was doing in school: in my adult life, between translating and writing and blogging and emailing and chatting and assorted casual internet use, I invariably write thousands and thousands of words every day. I probably write more words in a day in my adult life than I'd write in a semester of any given class when I was in school.
I guess they had us write so little in school because the teachers had to mark all of it. If each teacher taught 100 students in any given semester (because it's plausible and makes the math easy) and they had the students write even 1,000 words a day, they'd have to read and mark 100,000 words a day, which would be rather a lot to do every single day.
But this means that, in adult life, I can make as many stupid brainfarts in a day as I did in a semester in school before I have to start worrying about losing my faculties.
1 comment:
You know, the same thing happens to me and to everyone else I speak to about this. I type hear for here, and one for won!
From what I have seen of dementia, it does not look like a person who deals with words in three (or more?) different languages for her profession, buys a condo, analyzes the world around her in a blog... and occasionally types there when she means their.
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