Oh that was disappointing - I hadn't heard of one of them so I hit what I thought was the "skip" button, and it took me straight to the results of all of the questions without letting me try any of the rest.
I realise that this is because I am stupid - there is a warning, but I thought it was just warning me I wouldn't be able to try that question again, not that I wouldn't be able to try any of them. (It said that you wouldn't be able to go back again, but I didn't want to go back - I wanted to go forward.) Boo.
"Skip" implies moving to the next item "Skip to results" is a confusing way to phrase it. I guess "Go to results" would've made more sense. Weirdly, the actual skip button is labeled "Show Me Another".
Apparently, it happened to a lot of people. It's bad UX in an otherwise amazingly designed article.
Yeah, I fell victim to that as well. Had to open in incognito to get round it. There's also a really annoying scrolling feature where when you click in the text box the page scrolls down to hide the person's photo. No idea why they implemented that.
Did some programming for analysis of the Middle English Dialect project way back when. This was based on corpus of 320 words as they were spelt by scribes in different parts of the UK. Often the same scribe would spell a word 3 or 4 different ways in the same document. But there were regional variations etc. Fascinating topic. Helped to draw maps like:
I've been reading his books since I found out who wrote Fight Club in 1999. My brain does NOT want to remember how to spell his name. It makes me feel like I have a learning disability.
I can never spell "bureaucracy" correctly without assistance. I always have to spell check it. Sometimes I can't even get close enough to spell check. I can't think of any other English words I have such trouble with.
I cannot spell bureau. It trips me up even typing it. Maybe this is the thread that will have finally jammed it into my brain. I'll get back to you in a week or so. :-)
Doesn't apply to bureau, but I'm 100% there with you for the word beautiful. I simply can't hear the word in my heard without hearing Jim Carrey spell it out.
Okay got it, that will help. I’ve just made a mental note between bureau and eau de toilette. Thanks!
Edit: this got me wondering about bureau’s etymology. It’s a strange one:
The story of the word bureau is one of substitutions. In its original French, bureau originally named a “coarse woolen cloth,” particularly baize, the green, felt-like fabric that covers card and pool tables. Historically, bureaus draped desks, desks filled offices, and offices housed the business of governmental agencies ... Etymologically, though, bureau wasn’t green. The term derives from burel, an Old French diminutive of bure, “dark brown cloth.” Bure, in turn, may be from the Latin burrus, a word for “red” and related to the “fiery” Greek root that gives English pyro. Alternatively, the Old French bure may come the Latin burra, “shaggy garment” or “flock of wool.”
Bureau appears in English in French contexts as early as 1664 for an “office” or “business,” natively established by 1720. In the 1690s, bureau harkened back to its earlier sense of “writing desk” and extended to a “chest of drawers” by 1755, which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes as a chiefly American usage.
> I cannot spell bureau. It trips me up even typing it.
If it makes you feel any better, it trips me up reading it; I had to do 3 takes before my brain accepted that those letters were a word, and I still can't tell how to pronounce it. I suspect the problem is "eau"; that is a lot of vowels together for an English speaker.
I have to do bureau-cracy every time. But only after my brain tries to freehand it wrong. Usually twice. Maybe that’s the real reason I hate bureaucracies.
Beurau... no that’s not right what is it again? Buer... fuck.
> I can't think of any other English words I have such trouble with.
Probably because it's more french than english :)
Not an easy one either: English speakers have a lot of trouble with the "u" sound and "eau" pronounced "o" is far from obvious.
Yep, that's one of the main ones I can never spell either!
It sometimes help if I try to remember "bureau". bureaucracy is an organization governed by bureaus. But if I think about it too much, I just lose the ability to spell bureau too.
Is it easier to spell “bureau” itself correctly? If so, you might be able to use that as a mnemonic. You can also take the “-cracy” part from other words like “democracy”.
That's what I love about Spanish. There is this iron-clad rule that everything is spelt exactly as it's pronounced. Compared to English (or French), it's so ridiculously easy that (I sometimes think to myself) it must be a toy, not an actual human language.
And when they borrow words from other (not phonetic) languages, they just say "to hell with that spelling", and spell it in a perfectly logical way themselves.
There is an actual rule from the Real Academia that says that you can spell some imported words either as they are meant to in the original language, or as they are written. Many times they just adapt their writing, eg leader -> líder, but when an actual English word happens in Spain.. good luck at recognizing it!
It took me about one hour to understand which band we were talking about. The Eagles was spelt like 'los egles'
Something that helps me remember how to spell words is to memorize the pronunciation in German (which I studied a bit years ago). Not translating the word, actually pronouncing the English (or whatever) word as if it were German. So bureau would be "burr-eh-ah-oo" (probably not perfect but good enough). This would work in any language with consistent pronunciation.
> I generally veered off path around half-way on most of them.
That's something misleading about this visualisation... It makes it look like you got it more wrong because you have a letter wrong early in the word, even if every letter after it is right.
Personally I loved seeing the veering path for M. Night Shyamalan: https://imgur.com/a/Es5Q0nQ. Everybody said "There's a Y here somewhere," and veered off at a different point.
But a detour-based viz would have also looked cool: just a bunch of Y's stacked above the name, each one a different attempted insertion point.
I think it's age specific. If you're in the right age group you've heard of most of them. I got most wrong because I'd never heard of them, but Picabo Street is just a little older than me and she was well known in the late 90s.
The problem is that people with the same name spell it differently, so we're just trying to recall arbitrary [often phonetic] misspellings accrued -- often by illiterate people -- over generations.
If your family immigrated somewhere there's a good chance the immigration official gave you your current family name spelling.
For me, my surname has about a dozen variations that arise, it seems, from mediaeval British spelling variants. If I tell people my name then they usually spell it according to the variant they've commonly seen, but more often than not they get it wrong.
I don't personally know any of the people in the study, but I've seen most of the names in writing before ... ScarJo just happens to have the same spelling as my friend with the same surname.
I'm not sure what any of it proves?
Also, spellcheck? That surely perverts the results.
Know someone that was once excited to learn about the famous Chinese general that contributed to the American Civil War on hearing about General Lee for the first time, only to be quickly disappointed that it was a "Robert E." white guy.
There's also a difference between randos talking about you on the Internets and serious people spelling your name. They probably don't get it wrong on his chair or trailer on set. It's probably spelled right on his checks and other documents and in most all correspondence of any value. I cannot spell half my teammates last names from memory, but I don't rely on that because it's important communication.
This looks cool but I don't understand the results.
The correct path is the one highlighted in blue.
Is the most popular path the one that always follows the largest child? Or is the top-most child the most popular one? This is unambiguous on the Britney Spears example, but not on Zooey Deschanel, for example.
Also, I'd never heard of half of these people so had no idea how their name should be spelt.
Is this one of those cases where the wage slave at Ellis Island did a craptastic job of transliterating the name and they've been stuck with it ever since?
It's easier to just pick a varient which works in your new language. I've changed the pronunciation of my name because they Dutch have know idea how to pronounce it. They can't spell it either, however the phonetic spelling is close enough so I just let it slide. It's not worth getting precious when your name is unique enough.
It's one of the few I would have gotten first try, but they didn't include it in my test. I was still surprised how far off I was on the rest, though. Minaj was the only easy one.
Fun fact: "Mac" is the original Irish surname prefix meaning "son of," and "Mc" is the Anglicized form. McDonald = Son of Donald. As is usual, Irish names are patronymic meaning they're relating to the male's lineage. A daughter would be "Nic" (daughter of the son of) and wife "Mhic" (wife of the son of).
Then why so few "Nic"s and "Mhic"s? The Anglicized form isn't so particular about gender, so females use "Mac/Mc."
The "O'" prefix as in "O'Donnell" means "descendant of," along with its female variants.
I really don't like the interface here. It is way too easy to accidentally hit the wrong button and spoil what you're doing. I had to delete my cookies for the page in order to get around the "no going back" after I accidentally hit the wrong button.
A fun dataset (how many people cannot spell using Google's text box) but a couple of points
1. I could not recognise my first picture so had to use the speech tab - which I swear sounds like Mark McGuires (with the S). So I add the extra S and of course get it "wrong".
I know I am being picky but ...
Secondly, how much of this dataset is Google being too good at correcting our spelling - I know I regularly send google bad spellings simply because my thumbs cannot be bothered to rewind on a small phone when google is 99% likely to show me what I meant anyway.
Is there a comparison between mobile spelling percentage and desktop / keyboard spelling percentages - I suspect we all spell better on a keyboard than a phone ?
I misspell more words on a mobile device than a real keyboard. I used to use IRC over an ssh terminal and would occasionally connect using my phone when I was out of the house. The app wouldn't do autocorrect for anything typed into the terminal so my spelling was atrocious due to hitting the wrong buttons sometimes. At home using a real keyboard, I had a much easier time. I still spelled words wrong but those were words that I just don't know how to spell.
Whatever this author has done to the input field has really screwed it up on my phone. I type "Kae" and it just ends up as "KaekaeKae", any attempts to hit backspace just duplicate the input text again and again.
Names are probably the least-interesting thing to study with respect to spelling, because they are completely arbitrary and there is so much variation even in identical-sounding names.
Percentages would be more illustrative than absolute values, I feel. It looks like the visualisation partially accounts for relative proportion, with the width of the branches, but it's not a linear scale.
Thanks. I have Firefox 60.3.0esr (64-bit) in Debian jessie. So maybe it's the age, or that I block WebGL. Or maybe spoofing referrer. Or blocking local storage. Or something else about NoScript.
I realise that this is because I am stupid - there is a warning, but I thought it was just warning me I wouldn't be able to try that question again, not that I wouldn't be able to try any of them. (It said that you wouldn't be able to go back again, but I didn't want to go back - I wanted to go forward.) Boo.