You know that trick where some University released some sort of study which somehow proves something about the wonders of the brain involving the ability to escry meaning from semi-scrambled words? The one where the first and last letters are kept the same, but the claim that the order of letters in between the first and last letter does not matter?

It seems true enough–after all, the paragraph is usually written in this scrambled format, and since it’s still intelligible, it strikes one as true, somehow.

However, there’s more to a word than the position of the first and last letters. If all we needed were the first and last letters, thn it wd nt be a pm to ue oy to ls pr wd.

Oh, but perhaps we need a certain number of letters. Well, txxn we cxxxd jxxt sxxxe oxr wxxxs oxt wxxh txe axxxxxxxxxe nxxxxr of lxxxxxs.

Of less importance to written speech are vowels. Yf wy ryplycy yll thy vywyls wyth a syngly lyttyr, yt ys fyr myry yntyllygbly thyn thy ythyr twy yxmplys ybyvy.

It’s still not pretty, and it takes work, because vowels do make a difference in our language as it is (consider “boot,” “beet,” “beat,” “boat,” etc.). But it’s far easier and far more certain to make out the last example than it is the first two.

Lastly, scrambling the letters would have little effect on relatively short words where there are only a few letters to scramble.

Consider “important” with its internal letters scrambled randomly:

iamnoprtt
imtonpart
ionatmprt
inptamort
itmanrpot
intmporat
impornatt
iormpantt
imptorant
iamptonrt

The most recent incarnation had it spelled this way: “ipmorantt”.

(Oh, and in the above list, the first one was intentionally sorted alphabetically… it’s a possible outcome of random scrambling, but I threw it in there because it was gibberishy enough. Everything else was purely random.)

The random method came close to that, but you can see that the scramblings are all fairly local, that is, within one to three letters of its intended location.

The moral of the story? This anecdote attempts to prove that spelling is not important. However, using their logic, we can see that the order of letters does matter. Hence, spelling is important.