Submitted via IRC for Sulla
Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Friday April 06 2018, @04:05PM (2 children)
You can mangle the central letters of a word, as long as the front & back letter remain the same we generally do quite a good job at understanding the word/reading it. Our pattern recognition for letters in a similar fashion doesn't work as we'd expect. So many letters have small variances in their appearances we really shouldn't be surprised by these findings.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @06:18PM
No, that is not generally true [cam.ac.uk], just in that Internet example that was really popular 2003.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @07:56PM
What surprised me is that you didn't work in any angles about minorities or gender identification.