A mix-up at the printers caused amusement in York last weekend when a church sign was printed to read: ‘Chris Is Risen’. Luckily the missing ‘t’ on the four dodgy banners was spotted before they went up, but what can neurobiology tell us about how a mistake like this can make people chuckle?
When we read, the eyes don’t focus on individual letters in turn - this would take far too long. Instead we learn to recognise the general shape of words, or familiar phrases, allowing us to speed through texts and understand church signs at a glance.
Studies have shown that a word’s first and last letters are the most important in determining its shape, wchih menas i’ts slitl pbslisoe to udesnatrd a prsahe wetirtn lkie tihs - just about, anyway (although modern spell checkers make it very difficult to type).
So the unexpected missing last letter in ‘Christ’, along with the disruption of a well-known expression which would otherwise be skim-read, creates an element of surprise. But it’s probably only a cause for celebration if you have a very lazy friend called Chris.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
