Abbreviations
Sep. 7th, 2013 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomSo I'm listening to Standing Room Only, and they played "14 Dwight Ave., Natick, Massachusetts", from William Finn's Elegies—a song I'm very fond of.
The title of the song, which is repeated several times in the song itself, is "14 Dwight Ave., Natick, Massachusetts". Afterwards, the DJ announced the title of the song as "14 Dwight Avenue, Natick, Mass."
It's kind of interesting to me that she got wrong which word in the title is abbreviated, since it suggests she wasn't actually listening to the song very much and doesn't know it that well (anecdotally supporting my hypothesis that Standing Room Only has less knowledgeable hosts than it used to).
But it's also interesting that she got right that exactly one word was abbreviated—as if she picked that much up subconsciously, without being able to remember the (seemingly much more obvious) fact of which it was. You see something similar in spelling errors sometimes, where people remember how many double letters a word has but not which letters are doubled, so they're more likely to misspell Jennifer as Jeniffer than Jenniffer.
The title of the song, which is repeated several times in the song itself, is "14 Dwight Ave., Natick, Massachusetts". Afterwards, the DJ announced the title of the song as "14 Dwight Avenue, Natick, Mass."
It's kind of interesting to me that she got wrong which word in the title is abbreviated, since it suggests she wasn't actually listening to the song very much and doesn't know it that well (anecdotally supporting my hypothesis that Standing Room Only has less knowledgeable hosts than it used to).
But it's also interesting that she got right that exactly one word was abbreviated—as if she picked that much up subconsciously, without being able to remember the (seemingly much more obvious) fact of which it was. You see something similar in spelling errors sometimes, where people remember how many double letters a word has but not which letters are doubled, so they're more likely to misspell Jennifer as Jeniffer than Jenniffer.
