Fingers vs brain

Here’s another thing I have noticed about writing. My fingers can’t keep up with my brain. I touch type, kind of. I’ve never been taught to type but over the years I’ve developed a method that works. I suspect many people have. I’ve never really thought about it until now, as I type this. It seems my right hand – well, the thumb and the first two fingers – cover the entire keyboard right of the letter “T”, whereas the left hand is only responsible for letters to the left of the “T”, and really only involves the first two fingers. The only thing my right thumb seems to do is the space bar, the third finger of my left hand seems to be responsible for the shift key to get a capital letter, the fourth finger of my right hand seems to do nothing at all, I hold it curled in, and neither pinky finger does anything either. Backspace is covered by the third finger on my right hand, which being the longest can stretch that little bit further. Effectively I’m using four fingers and one thumb all the time, and occasionally another finger gets a look in. But sometimes, when my right hand is more concentrated on letters towards the right, “P” and “O” for instance, then I’ve noticed that the index finger of my left hand suddenly becomes responsible for the letter “T”. It is fascinating, there are probably studies and studies on it. I have never measured my speed and in any event, fascinating though it might well be, in my considered opinion this paragraph has now become incredibly boring. Wish I’d never started it. Plus it might be that I am squeezed into an airline seat and my elbows are in an unnatural position which might be altering how I type. I’ll let you know on that one later, once I’m sat at a desk.

This is not what I meant to write at all. What I meant to explore was that I regularly find that miss out words when I am typing. I do it at work in emails and I do it here too. Whenever I reread something I have written there is a better than even chance that I will discover that I have simply missed out a word. I hope I am not going senile. I like to think of it as my brain being simply too active and my fingers cannot keep up, which I why I went down a typing rabbit hole just then. But I also catch myself simply writing the wrong word. Generally these are words that sound like each other – write and right, think and thing, site and sight, things like that. Funnily enough it is rarely their vs there or ones like that, the classic ones that people get wrong simply because they don’t understand that there is actually a difference in the first place. His instead of he’s is one I see frequently, another example of the collision of phonetics and ignorance. I am not immune to it of course, nobody is. There was one in the last post which I spotted and corrected before I published it but I can’t now remember what is was other than it prompted me to write a note about it. It could have been work vs walk or something along those lines. All I know is that as I type I am speaking to myself in my head, composing a sentence slightly ahead of typing it, and I suppose I lose track. This whole speaking in your head constant inner monologue thing, when you actually stop and consider it, is incredibly strange whilst also being the most natural thing in the world. I would love to have some kind of implant that just formed the words on the screen as I thought them, or spoke them to myself. I suppose that dictation machines combined with modern technology do exactly that, I have not explored it. Maybe this laptop has such a function, where I speak and it “types”? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I am not sure I would be able to use it as I am forever going back on myself, starting again, picking up somewhere in the middle and refining (ha!) a sentence. For what it is worth I never use spell checkers either, whatever I type that is what goes in. I generally pick up mistakes as I type them, but I am often surprised at what does get through when I reread a post. I am also not sure to what extent the software auto-corrects my mistakes, and if in fact I make a lot more than in fact get through. As I test I deliberately misspelled “make” in the last sentence and sure enough it got sorted out without any intervention on my part. “Sotred” instead of “sorted” was left uncorrected though, I have no idea why, but along with the missing words this is the kind of thing that I find whilst rereading recent posts and end up going back in and sorting out when time allows.   

I suppose what might be sensible is leaving all posts in draft and doing the rereading before hitting publish but where’s the fun in that. Everyone gets to see my dumb mistakes, at least for a short period before I rewrite history. Future generations will not realise how inept I was.