Misled!

Today I was thinking about a popular thing to think about, that whole question of whether or not we're all seeing the same things the same way. Does the colour I call green look the same inside your head as it does to me? Is the thing in my head I'd label a triangle look like something completely different inside yours? Leonard Nimoy died today at I think 83, so sadly, probably one of the greatest tools for finally resolving that question about whether the little electronic signals in my brain would create the same thoughts if I wired them right into yours probably died with him. Nobody else I know of is available to perform the Vulcan Mind Meld.

But Leonard and what he should symbolize to every aspiring actor who just never seems to land that lead role is a topic for another day.

I bet many of the legions of devoted followers I just know are reading this post (a total of 88 views of the whole blog so far, probably about 55 of which are alllll mine) hear a kind of narrator's voice in their head as they read.  Remember the progression from reading out loud to mastering the very grownup skill of reading without moving your lips? For a lot of us our lips were moving because our desperate effort to not read out loud took all the concentration we had, and not silently moving the mouth was a level of concentration to be attained another day. The point is, we learn to read by hearing the sounds that the combinations of letters are supposed to represent. So, we hear our narrator's voice. I wonder how many of us hear a voice that isn't ours? How many think James Earl Jones is their inside voice? any Cindy Laupers? Winston Churchill? or does everyone just hear their own voice, the same as the one they hear when they just speak out loud? I've got to focus here, focus!

How many people have had the terrible experience of revealing the voice of their inner narrator to the outside world (a process often referred to as "reading aloud") and finding out that the voice they've lived so comfortably with, reading book after book, can turn out to be wrong? That there are some kinds of letter combinations that make a word whose meaning you divine correctly from the context in which it's used, but whose sound is one that...well, one that you failed to notice you never heard in the outside, real world? I bet it's happened to lots of people, and I bet there's something very revealing here about how our minds work, and how individuals develop perception and sort their place in the world, if only we studied this phenomenon.

Here was mine: in my Grade 9 English class, we were reading "The Red Badge of Courage", and as usual taking turns reading aloud. I was pretty comfortable with this exercise, because I knew I was a good reader and I enjoyed reading on my own. During my turn, some sentence came up with the word "misled" in it. I'll just mention again that I could have given a pretty good definition of that word if I was asked to, so I was surprised when the teacher interrupted me and asked me to read that sentence again, which I did. I was mortified to discover, right there in front of 25 peers, and at a very delicate social developmental stage, too, that that word was NOT pronounced "mys-eld" but was in fact the same exact word as the one I thought was spelled mislead and pronounced "miss led". My inner narrator was a nitwit! I'm kind of surprised I ever heard his voice again.

I've talked to others who had this same experience with different words. My daughter did the same thing with "awry"; her Narrator told her it was pronounced "orry" and she did not really know for certain what another completely different word she had heard but not read but which was pronounced "aw-wry" meant. I wonder what other ones people have had this with...I wonder if there are just particular words with particular vowel/consonant combos that lend themselves to this kind of thing? I wonder it's actually just a universal experience that not many remember?

I really wonder if it was worth this whole post to ask, too....