The F words...

Okay, since everyone is wondering about the “F” thing, perhaps I should explain – Eric forwarded me an email last night with a couple puzzles and optical illusions. One of them included the following statement, with instructions to “count every ‘F’ that appears in the text.” (I’m copying it exactly as it looked in the email, even though there are a couple weird word breaks. I’m assuming that’s to make the whole thing look more confusing…) So go ahead and count all the F’s:


FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS...


Okay, so how many F’s did everyone find? There are 6 within the text, but supposedly our brains have a tendency to jump over small words like “of.” So a lot of people only find three or four of the F’s. The email also mentioned that if you found all 6, you’re “a genius” and it included a picture of Albert Einstein, just to add some visual emphasis. So now I’d like to mention that I found all 6 of the F’s the first time I read that little sentence, and I am, therefore, a genius. Because the mysterious, invisible, anonymous email author said so.

Actually, I think finding all those F’s probably has more to do with the time I’ve spent proofreading. When you start proofreading, you learn very quickly that you CAN’T skip over the small words. Some of the best mistakes are hidden in the small words – and if you DO manage to find them, you’re respected as some sort of proofreading mastermind, and editors and designers gaze at you in awe and amazement. So like I said, I figured out pretty quickly that the small words were just as important as the big ones…

The designers where I used to work would often scan old documents into their computers so they could be reformatted and updated, without needing to be completely retyped. But the problem with scanning a document is that scanners don’t always “see” everything correctly. So even though these were old documents, and someone along the line had already proofed them, I would need to go through them again to catch the scanner mistakes. One of the most common errors I found was a proliferation of the nonexistent word “ot.” When read in context, it was easy to see that “ot” was supposed to be “of.” Since “f” and “t” look rather similar – especially if you’re a computer scanner with a not-so-precise eye – it was obvious why this popped up so often. And perhaps that’s another reason I noticed all those F’s – I was having “ot” flashbacks.

Of course, the other explanation would simply be that I really AM a genius. :)