Melville House Books

The ever-vigilant Bookslut points us to an interesting piece by Stan Carey at his Sentence First blog about “a typo more mysterious than most” — typing “that” when you mean “than.” “If you Google “bigger that”, “more common that”, etc., and ignore the false positives, you’ll get a hint of the extent of this mistake,” writes Carey.

However, he continues, “For such a widespread and apparently simple typo, its cause is rather mysterious. It is not like typing my name as ‘Stab’ or ‘Stabn’, which I often do, and which is a simple misstroke resulting from the adjacency of B and N on a QWERTY keyboard and the mechanical imprecision of my typing. T and N are not adjacent, and that-for-than is not an error of omission, duplication, transposition, or repetition. Nor do that and than overlap in meaning. So whence this ubiquitous typo?”

It may be something called “capture errors” — typos that occur “when one intends to type one sequence, but gets ‘captured’ by another that has a similar beginning.’” Or it could be due to a similar phenomenon known as “completion errors.” Carey details studies describing both and discusses their varieties, as well as other possibilities, related to “muscle memory” and/or “autofilling” — when our fingers type faster than our brains.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.