Why can't I count the Fs?

August 16, 2009 5:52 PM

I have lots of questions about an email FW: I have received many, many times.

How many times does the letter F appear in the following sentence?

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

This is ridiculous. There are 6. Even when I know there are 6, I struggle to recount them. The email suggests that only the super-intelligent will count 6, and the rest of us are idiots. I am of, perhaps, slightly above average intelligence, at best, so this may be true.

Being of only slightly above average intelligence, I have lots of questions. Why? Why does our (forgive the simplification, for I don't know how brains work) language brain override our shape recognition brain? (When did language become more important to survival than shape recognition? Are they in fact the same thing?) Wouldn't this also mean that the more intelligent you are, the less Fs you will count, (if we accept language skills are a good measure of intelligence). I take it that this obviously doesn't work in languages where the pronunciation of F and V differs from English, among others (a couple of google searches suggest that the brain perceives'of' as 'ov'). The text is often presented with non-standard line breaks, and I haven't seen this online with different sentences. Is this a phenomenon that can be seen in other texts, or is specific to this particular sentence? Does this phenomenon have a name?

What is the best way to pluralise letters? It seems common to use an apostrophe, and according to a lecturer I had four years ago, this is okay with decades, for example, the 1980's, but it just feels wrong next to a single letter. It's a proper noun, right? So the pluralisation should just be a simple 's'.

Is language even the best tool to talk about language? (See how I accidentally used the word 'talk' in there, presupposing that the only way to have discourse about language is to use language? What's that, post-structuralism?) It seems strange to me that we would, as a species, have reached the best form of communication so early in our existence. Is language the killer app for Humans, alongside thought? (Are they the same thing in some ways?) You can talk about dancing, but you can't dance about it. You can think about talking, and you can talk about thinking.

Sorry - got a bit carried away there... I'll settle for an answer to 'Why can't I identify the Fs in 'OF'?

posted by doublehappy to science & nature (25 comments total)

I think it's because if you read it out loud (or "hear" it in your head), you'll skip the F's in 'of' because we pronounce that as a V sound.
posted by contessa at 5:58 PM on August 16

If you copy and paste it into vim and do

:%s/[^Ff]//g

it will make it a lot easier. :D

...but no. We tend to skip over articles and other small words, seeing them as sort of ideograms rather than as words comprised of letters. I'm not aware of the research that goes into this—I just remember it from Linguistics class. Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Perhaps someone with more knowledge about linguistics (or a more analytical brain) is more likely to approach it as a string of characters rather than as a sentence. That might make a difference.

Pluralize letters with –'s, as in “Mind your P's and Q's.” It's not a question of its being a proper noun, I think, but rather that it's ugly otherwise. Think about “As,” “Is,” and “Us.”

“The game was ruined because I only had Us.”

Now, as for language itself. Language is just a term for the system we, as humans, have evolved to use in order to signify meaning. If we had evolved to signify meaning by changing the colors of our eyes, that would be language. (Or blue-purple-green, as it were). Given that we have a few million years of evolution involved in our ability to think about and vocalize language—yes, it is our killer app. Language is the foundation of our “received wisdom;” it's the reason we can build upon the ideas of the people who went before. Look into some of the case studies about “feral children.” They usually have no language and function essentially at the level of animals.
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:11 PM on August 16

I don't think it has anything to do with intelligency, although I know that the more fluent you are in English, the less likely you are to count all the Fs. I think that we tend to discount words like "if", "the", and "a", or rather, look past them because we know the meaning of the sentence lies elsewhere... I suppose a good test would be to create a sentence with Hs, for instance.

Okay, count the Hs:

My house is a very very very fine house, with two cats in the yard.

Or rather, give that to someone who hasn't been primed with the f test!

I tend to disbelieve the of/ov hypothesis, because there are a lot of words we pronounce weirdly and as far as I know, this test wouldn't work with them, although I suppose we could try to test that too.
posted by shaun uh at 6:13 PM on August 16 [1 favorite]

The basic (very, very oversimplified and imprecise) answer is because once you are a fluent reader of English, you read it as pictograms, not as letters (that is, once you've been reading english for a long time you read the words the same way a reader of Chinese ideograms reads the words) -- your brain does not see the separate letters "o" and "f" in of, it just sees the *whole word* "of" -- and it's actually quite hard to go back and read this word phonetically. Because of this, as you're counting f's, you're pretty literally listening (in your head, probably) for the f sound, because you're not really seeing any f's at all.
posted by brainmouse at 6:17 PM on August 16 [1 favorite]

Because we don't really look at "utility" words like "of". They don't carry the important meaning of the sentence which is what the brain is focused on.

I'd be that if the letter in question was changed to "T" and the sentenced had instances of "at", the results would be broadly similar, though the "ov" thing probably plays into it quite as well.

I really doubt catching then all as much to do with intelligence.
posted by spaltavian at 6:18 PM on August 16

Because I failed to do look at preview -- I disagree with some of the answers above, I don't think it's because "of" is a small word, i think it's because the f makes a v sound. I can't prove this.
posted by brainmouse at 6:18 PM on August 16

I'm am amused with the number of typos my post about language had.
posted by spaltavian at 6:20 PM on August 16 [1 favorite]

You can always cheat and read the sentence backwards, starting with the last word. The act of making it strange slows me down enough that I am less likely to miss particular letters.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:22 PM on August 16 [1 favorite]

I think it's because of skipping "utility" words, not because of the sound.

My evidence is that I scanned the sentence by moving my finger across the screen and STILL only got three.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:33 PM on August 16

I remember this one. It's article skipping, not V-soundingness.

It's almost identical to the proofreading puzzles where one misses the double "the" (or some other article) because the two instances are broken across two lines.

We read past articles.
posted by rokusan at 6:34 PM on August 16

Don't feel too bad. My first time I counted seven. So, uh, yeah - it could be worse.
posted by chinston at 7:28 PM on August 16 [1 favorite]

Because we don't really look at "utility" words like "of". They don't carry the important meaning of the sentence which is what the brain is focused on.

Probably important to note here the role that structural predictability of natural language plays in our ability to skim those words—the in-grown syntax of English makes "of" not just an acceptable but the likely token in all the places in which it occurs in this (rather stilted and contrived) sentence.

Utility words carry important semantic content—the difference between a definite vs. indefinite article or between one preposition vs. another can have profound effects on the meaning of a sentence—but in cases where the predictive capacity of our language facility teams up with a sentence built for predictive bulldozering, that's a less active part of the proceedings.
posted by cortex at 7:36 PM on August 16

Not a language person, but I noticed this in a similar word puzzle, and think I see another factor:

The letters that are missed in such puzzles are often at the end of words. We rush.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 8:52 PM on August 16

The reason it's hard to count the Fs is because skilled readers don't see the letters as much as they see the words. If you were a new reader you sound out each word and count each F without a hitch.
posted by chairface at 10:02 PM on August 16

The sentence also starts with a couple of very obvious initial Fs... training us to spot those kind, and miss the less important ones.
posted by rokusan at 10:43 PM on August 16

The sentence also starts with a couple of very obvious initial Fs... training us to spot those kind, and miss the less important ones.

In all examples I have seen this has been the case. The sentence always begins with strong 'f' words and everyone always counts the Fs at the beginnings of words. Some catch the F in scientific, though many people miss that one too.

I don't buy the 'ov' answer, it works with 'if' too and I've seen it done with other letters than F.
posted by missmagenta at 12:21 AM on August 17

Ha! I've been working with fonts on a band poster for the last hour or so, and I caught all your F's, first go round, no problem. Of course, the band poster requires staring at letters as individuals as opposed to whole words, since I'm fine tuning the typographic aesthetics and can't have silly things like needlessly serifed T's throwing me off.

Maybe I'll try this again in the morning and see how hard it is, but it's really in how you're looking for letters, and once you see the letter as a shape it's a different kettle of effing fish.
posted by redsparkler at 12:47 AM on August 17

doublehappy: "What is the best way to pluralise letters? It seems common to use an apostrophe, and according to a lecturer I had four years ago, this is okay with decades, for example, the 1980's, but it just feels wrong next to a single letter. It's a proper noun, right? So the pluralisation should just be a simple 's'."

The best way is to follow the rules of English. The plural of F is Fs. Likewise, it is not okay to write 1980's rather than 1980s, CD's instead of CDs or bean's instead of beans.
posted by turkeyphant at 4:32 AM on August 17 [1 favorite]

> skilled readers don't see the letters as much as they see the words.

Don't overgeneralize. Some skilled readers read like that. Some of us, who have been trained in proofreading and copyediting, notice everything.

> The best way is to follow the rules of English. The plural of F is Fs. Likewise, it is not okay to write 1980's rather than 1980s, CD's instead of CDs or bean's instead of beans.

Please don't try to answer questions when you don't know what you're talking about. There are no "rules of English" in this context; there are only style guides, and as long as you are consistent you can follow whatever guide you choose (or your employer chooses). Style guides differ on all the issues you mention except for beans, which you just threw in there to make your position look better.
posted by languagehat at 5:46 AM on August 17 [3 favorites]

Incidentally, on the subject of pluralizing letters, you always have the option of spelling out the names of the letters as words.

Ef (or Eff) appears in many English dictionaries, end either of these can take the plural -s with no problem at all.

Though of course you run the risk of people having no idea what you're talking about.
posted by 256 at 5:56 AM on August 17

How could people not know what I'm talking about when I mention aitches, dubyas, exes, and wyes?

The sentence also starts with a couple of very obvious initial Fs... training us to spot those kind, and miss the less important ones.

This is it. Consider that "for" is in the same class of words as "of," but the eff would be much more noticeable because it isn't "buried" in the word.
posted by kittyprecious at 7:59 AM on August 17

Likewise, it is not okay to write 1980's rather than 1980s, CD's instead of CDs or bean's instead of beans.

I never write CD's, as it looks wrong to me (compact disc's) but 1980's/1980s seems to be a style rather than grammatical issue. It became clearer to me when I learned Spanish, a language which has no apostrophes as everything is written out in full ie. 'Clare's book' is 'the book belonging to Clare'. A lot of people don't become aware of their native language's grammar until they learn a second and have to study rules which are second nature in their everyday tongue - it's just somethingof which one rarely becomes aware.

If it helps, I've been reading at an adult level since I was three and have a linguistics degree, and I still get confused about where to put an apostrophe in 'its' if it isn't a contraction of 'it is'. I'd like to think this is a measure of my inability to remember the rule rather than general intelligence.
posted by mippy at 8:02 AM on August 17

How could people not know what I'm talking about when I mention aitches, dubyas, exes, and wyes?

I didn't learn to read phonetically. When people spell out words as 'yuh ay cee aitch tee' it initially makes no sense at all.
posted by mippy at 8:04 AM on August 17

It was a very weak attempt at lexico-humor. I'm still amused at some of the "spellings" that come up for individual letters in the NYT crossword.
posted by kittyprecious at 8:17 AM on August 17

[Let's please not have an extensive derail about style guides here. You guys can mail each other if you want to argue about it further.]
posted by cortex at 9:34 AM on August 17