The Eyeglasses Of Time

     These days, they can correct for a lot of vision problems.  Can't focus up close, can't focus far away, look at things sideways and starbursty?  They can fix that.  I grew up with severe nearsightedness, bad to begin with and worse every year, with a side of astigmatism and by my early forties, I needed reading glasses with contacts, and eventually bifocals.  They'd fixed some of my nearsightedness when I had cataract surgery, but left me with worse astigmatism (had I known that it would be worse, and how much the not covered by insurance upcharge for astigmatism correction was going to be, I would have paid the extra two grand; day of surgery is maybe not the right time to tell the patient).  My eyeglasses deal with it, and now I have to layer on magnification for close work -- but I miss non-blurry reading without glasses.

     There's another kind of vision problem that no lens can fix.  I ran into it just this morning: seeing over time.  I opened my browsers and found a typo in the first line of yesterday's post!

     But -- I'd checked it.  Multiple times.  Blogger's defaults these days mean I write posts in "compose" mode, then go over to "HTML view" to review what the robot thought I wanted in the way of hypertext commands.  That gets me a look at the text in two different fonts, which is usually enough to catch the misspelling, homonyms (bane of fast typists) and typos.  Usually, but not every time.

     Manuscripts -- fiction, mostly -- are even worse.  Thanks to decades of hammering out mostly-unpublishable fiction on typewriters, I typically compose in a typewriter-like font (Courier), because that looks right to my eye, then change to Times New Roman, replace all my two-spaces-between-sentences with a single space,* turn all the five-space paragraph indents† into half-inch ones (locating and correcting every instance where the word processor sneaked in a plain carriage return instead of a proper paragraph marker‡), and then run them through two different word processing programs and let spellcheck and grammar check point out what they think is wrong.  I don't always agree with the software's suggestions, but it's another set of eyes -- and even after all that, if I let the manuscript sit for a week or a month and then go back to it, I will find things that are obviously wrong.

     Time gives you distance from your words.  In the first day or two, you're still looking at the screen or pages through what you intended to write instead of what's there, and your eye will slide right by missing letters, wrong words and punctuation that appears to have been dropped from orbit by creatures who do not use language in the ways that we do.

     I can't entirely explain it.  Surely the eye can't miss what's right before it?  But it does, slick as a magic trick, unless you let the piece sit a spell and become a little less familiar before you take another look.
_________________________
* Two spaces after a full stop is a habit I can break only a little easier than I can give up breathing.  It's automatic.
 
† And this one is nearly as ingrained.  New thought, new paragraph, thumb hits the spacebar five times and I am already composing before that last thwack.
 
‡ Most WYSIWYG word processors have a button or command to let you look behind the scenes; in Word and LiberOffice, it's marked with a paragraph sign or pilcrow, ¶.  Both have some provision to edit these hidden commands when you've made them visible, though figuring it out can be very frustrating.  Older programs used inline commands, a series of incantations the user had to learn, which could be very flexible once you had them down.  But J. Random Manager could not be handed that kind of tricky, opaque tool and be expected to crank out memos and sales orders fifteen minutes later, and so we got Word and its competitors.