My mother is closing the forwarding gap with the rest of the e-mailing world. The kidneys story, for example, I first received over e-mail probably 3 years before I got it from my mom. However, on 9/18 I received a forwarded message from Jan, and then on 9/21 I get the same message from my Mom. And yet, it's not quite the same message, which leads us to embark on an exercise in comparative e-mail analysis. It's intriguing to think that in addition to all the people out there who forward messages along, there are some who decide the message also needs to be tweaked here and there along the way. And then you can wonder about the internal dialogue that led them to make this change or that, akin to what literary scholars do when they go through the galley revisions of Ulysses.
Of the two messages, I believe that the one Jan sent me was either first or that it's closer to the Ur-message that inspired both than my Mom's message. I believe this both because I received Jan's message first and because of some of the characteristics of the differences between the two messages.
Below, I've highlighted all the differences between the two messages:
Jan's message:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses
and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid
deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
My mother's message:
THIS IS REALLY AMAZING - TRY IT &SEE WHAT YOU THINK!
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey
lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Let's go through them, from the standpoint of our unknown editor:
1. THIS IS REALLY AMAZING - TRY IT &SEE WHAT YOU THINK! "The paragraph needs a little attention-getting teaser at the front, so people won't just think it's a drab little paragraph typed out of some newspaper and not bother to read it. Plus, it will clue people in that there is something remarkable about the paragraph that follows, in case their minds so subconsciously parse the scrambled letters that they don't even realize that the letters are scrambled. And if you want to get the attention of busy e-mail readers and put them on their toes, YOU NEED TO USE CAPITAL LETTERS."
2. at an Elingsh uinervtisy "Cambridge University won't mean anything to most people out there. Let's change it to 'English', because, unlike the ungrateful French, England stood beside us in the war. Besides, 'Cambridge' is also the name of a brand of cigarettes, and I would hate for any little kids who might get forwarded this message to start smoking on account of it."
3. is "'letters be at the right place.' That isn't really correct. Isn't it sad how no one knows English grammar anymore? You wouldn't get mistakes like this all the time in e-mail if Ronald Reagan had invented the Internet instead of Al Gore. Let's change it to 'is'."
4. toatl "Oops. There's a word that's more than three letters that's not scrambled up at all. Well, that's easy enough to fix."
5. the huamn mnid "Hmm, this makes me suspicious of the politics of the person who wrote the message. Human minds don't read, humans do. So let's change that to 'we', even though it will mean cutting out two scrambled words. A shorter message is more likely to be read and forwarded, anyway."
6. it slef "Suspicions confirmed. Only crazy liberals spell 'itself' as one word, since right there in the King James Bible it's two words. If 'it self' is good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for the people reading this message. Plus the pinko author has put a comma where one isn't needed, so I should remove that, too."
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