I'm pretty sure that 'popsicle stick' needs no hyphen.

Anyway, the fact that it's possible to find words that you (personally) can't read when scrambled doesn't make the entire phenomenon 'actually untrue'.

While I am unable to produce a working example, I would not be surprised if there existed a word that could be scrambled in this fashion to produce another, valid, English word.

(And yes "mispronounce" gets rather tricky, even in context)



Just because it works for some cases, and not all cases, doesn't make it 'true'.
(Last I checked, a single counter example proved theories false).

Check again.

'Some, and not all' is a terribly biased description. 'The vast majority of cases for the vast majority of people' is more accurate.

I personally don't think it's "just" recognizing individual words, or even "just" context clues.

It's pattern recognition. Something the human brain is often pretty good at.


BUT. I've derailed the thread. What was that about edition or naming wars?



-k

AFAIK, the brain uses multiple strategies at once (in competition, even, which is wacky), and they also influence each other at the same time. Wild. It's pretty fascinating stuff.