At one point or another, we’ve probably been emailed the following:

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 toatl 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.

While there wasn’t a published paper on the topic from Cambridge University, Graham Rawlinson from Nottingham University did write his PhD Thesis on “The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition” in 1976. He tested a lot of different things such as replacing letters with their mirror images, reversing the letter order of words, reversing the word order of passages, keeping the first two and last two characters fixed while mixing the inner characters, and substituting letters with other ones that may or may not be similar. The results generally showed that it is possible to guess words with incomplete information, and humans are better at guessing the words if only the middle letters have been rearranged. This last part makes a lot of sense if you’ve ever tried to do a Jumble in the newspaper; the whole point is that it’s hard to unscramble words.

How does the trick work? First, note that the text is written in lowercase for the most part. In 1955, Miles Tinker found that reading lowercase text was more legible than all-capital text because of the “characteristic words forms furnished by this type.” Building on this work and scientific studies conducted from 1982 to 1990, Colin Wheildon explains “When a person reads a line of type, the eye recognizes letters by the shapes of their upper halves.” Looking at the shapes of the words, most letters are either switched with letters of the same height (like in “wlohe”) or only offset by one character (as in “ltteer” where tt has been shifted to the left by one character).

The next important point is how much the inside of the words have been jumbled. Two and three letter words cannot be jumbled and four letter words can only have their inside letters swapped. It’s only when we reach five letter words and beyond that we can sufficiently scramble the words to hide their meaning. Here are a few examples from Posit Science:

As soon as the longer words have their letters randomly distributed, it’s very hard to decipher what they say. Assigning one point for each place a letter has moved, the harder scrambled words have scores of 16, 18, and 20 compared to 8, 4, and 8 respectively. This small amount of randomization is easy enough for us to overcome, especially when compared to how the words could have been written.

When reading we also gain context from the sentence as a whole and can infer the meaning of words without knowing what they are. In the third sentence, “The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm,” 8 of the 15 words are unscrambled giving us ample context. This might be a point we miss as they’re all function words (words that join together the important nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives that give the sentence its substance) which we tend to ignore when reading. Further, while total is rearranged to toatl it retains its overall sound, which is another piece of information we use when reading.

The final issue with the theory is with words that can be rearranged into multiple other words. For example, salt can be rearranged as slat, but these words were avoided in the passage lest the effect be ruined. Clive Tooth has found a wonderful example of this in the following sentence:

“The sprehas had ponits and patles”

There are multiple rearrangements possible here including:

• The sherpas had pitons and plates.
• The shapers had points and pleats.
• The seraphs had pintos and petals.
• The sphaers had pinots and palets.
• The sphears had potins and peltas.

In summation, this hoax is similar to writing a paragraph missing that fifth symbol: it’s a pain to concoct but it only slows you down slightly to turn words into conclusions. As a bonus point, grammar is missing in parts such as “According to a research at…” and a word or two don’t unmix rightly such as “rscheearch” to “research” and “iprmoetnt” to “important”. Additional data by a PhD linguist is at this URL: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/

Today’s Tangent: Jumble was created by Martin Naydel in 1954 and now appears in more than 600 newspapers daily worldwide. An unintended byproduct was a gameshow in 1994 where four contests would face off to solve jumbles in the fastest time possible. It was one of four game shows created by Wink Martindale and Bill Hilleir for the Family Channel. Jumble only lasted six months, twice as long as the short running Shuffle also created by the duo. None of the game shows were still being produced after 1994.

My Tuesday Tidbits went on an unannounced hiatus for two weeks due to other obligations, such as the talk I did for Ignite 10. I’ll be writing up an article on my experiences leading up to my presentation and on the night, so look for that later this week. – Travis Gerhardt

During wartime lots of things become scarce: metal, meat, sugar, gasoline, and even chocolate. For the United States in World War II, chocolate was sent to the troops leaving those at home looking for something else sweet. It is because of this shortage that they turned towards jelly beans and other confections, helping to broaden the different candies available and ensuring that jelly beans would be around for generations. But there’s a lot more to jelly beans than just a wartime treat, and to tell that tale we need to visit Turkey more than two hundred years ago.

While the exact origins of Turkey Delight are unknown, the modern day version of the sweet was first found in 1776 in Istanbul, Turkey. It was at this time that Bekir Effendi, a confectioner from Anatolia set up a small shop there and started to sell his new confection. Unfortunately information around this event is scarce but we can piece together some things. It seems as though an ancestor of the treat existed back in  1626 as Francis Bacon wrote about similar sweets from Turkey:

They have in Turkey and the East certain confections, which they call servets, which are like to candied conserves, and are made of sugar and lemons, or sugar and citrons, or sugar and violets, and some other flowers; and some mixture of amber for the more delicate persons: and those they dissolve in water, and thereof make their drink, because they are forbidden wine by their law.

Bekir Effendi took this treat and made it softer and covered it in a liberal amount of icing sugar. Legend has it that he presented this sweet to the ruler Abdul Hamid I after he was commissioned to make a new confection; it quickly became a coveted dish and was associated with royalty. Eventually a Briton discovered the delight and brought back crates of it to England, reselling it under the name Turkish Delight. From there it made its way over to the United States and near the end of the 19th century was turned into the jelly bean.

The jelly bean was created by taking the jelly of a Turkish Delight, shaping it into a bean, and coating it with a soft shell of sugar. The coating is added in a method called panning where the centre of the candies are put in a open container that is partly filled with syrup, and then they are rolled allowing the candy to be coated evenly as the shells slowly harden. Since Turkish Delight came in multiple flavours, early jelly beans shared this trait and experienced great success during the penny candy craze of the time.

In the early 1900’s, the penny candy craze subsided in favour of everything chocolate. It wasn’t until World War II that jelly beans and other non-chocolate treats resurged. Then in 1960,  the small Herman Goelitz Candy Company decided to change from primarily producing candy corn to multiple other confections including jelly beans and the United States’ first gummi bears. These jelly beans caught the attention of then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would end up eating them through his two terms in office, famous writing “we can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around the jar of jelly beans.”

In 1976, David Klien had an idea for jelly beans of unusual flavour and top notch quality, and pitched his idea to Herm Rowland, then owner of the Herman Goelitz Candy Company. Using the Goelitz company as a distributor, Klien created the Jelly Belly brand and launched with eight initial flavours including root beer and cream soda, flavours that had never been made into jelly beans before. In 1980, Klein and his business partner sold Jelly Belly and all the associated trademarks to the Herman Goelitz Candy Company for $4.8 million.

Around this same time, Ronald Reagan became President of the United States and with his presidency brought Jelly Belly jelly beans to the Oval Office and on Air Force One. He went further and asked for a blueberry flavoured jelly bean so he could serve red, white, and blue ones at parties he hosted. Then in 1983, Reagan sent Jelly Bellies to the astronauts of the space shuttle Challenger as a surprise. Throughout his eight years as president, he continued to have the jelly beans as a snack, helping to launch the Jelly Belly company into further financial success. Because of this huge influence, a portrait of the former president (shown above) made out of jelly beans hangs in the Jelly Belly visitor centre in Fairfield.

Today’s Tangent: While we may know them as Turkish Delights, the Turks definitely don’t call them that. The original word for these treats were lokum, which now translates from Turkish to English as Turkish Delight. However, not all translations are as simple. In Romanian the word is rahat which is a shorting of the Arabic translation rahat ul-holkum. Interesting, the Romanian rahat took another meaning, roughly translating to shit in English. I’d say that English got the taster of the two translations.