Oh our crazy laguage.

Tonight’s Blog comes from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. I learned something really interesting today. Pinker says, “All speech is an illusion. We hear speech as a string of separate words. But, in the speech sound wave one word runs into the next word seamlessly, there are no white spaces like in text. We hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.” Crazy you say? So did I. But, think about hearing a foreign language. It is virtually impossible to distinguish one word from another, the words are not in your mental language. He also give some fun examples of sentences that should alike but have completely different meanings. These are called “oronyms”. Here’s a few examples.
The good can decay many ways.
The good candy came anyways.

The stuffy nose can lead to problems.
The stuff he knows can lead to problems.

I’m not sure what this has to do with making your writing sparkle but I thought it was interesting anyway.