Typing, typo, typee

[desperance]

Sometimes I love my fingers. Thing is, I have very few manual skills, and virtually no hand-eye coordination (the only reason why I didn't spend many happy and famous years opening the batting for Kent and England and bowling my devilish off-breaks is that I have absolutely no ability at cricket, with bat or ball, and I can't catch either). I'm quite good with a knife, necessarily, but that's only by virtue of many scars.

However, typing is nothing to do with coordinating hand and eye. It may be some complicated inverse, whereby it's the inner eye that drives the hand, but the one thing you don't have to do is watch what you're doing. I'm proud of my typing skills. I taught them to me one Easter holiday, back when I was fourteen or so, when it was clear to me that I was going to need them. That was, um, thirty-three years ago and I've been practising ever since, so I ought to be good by now; but I am fast and accurate and adaptable, moving from a flat mini-keyboard to a broad and sculptured ergonomic device with barely a blink or a fumble.

Of course I make mistakes, we all do, but I generally know when I have, I feel it happen before I spot it onscreen. And sometimes those mistakes are just gleeful. Any number of reasons for that, synchronicity or assonance or unintended meaning; but the ones I love best are when they are recognisable finger-behaviour, muscle-memory at war with my mind.

As this morning, where I needed to type the word 'dammed', for the first time in my life (I always know, first time: the fingers tell me, haven't done this before). On the other hand, I have typed 'damned' innumerable times. So I know there's likely to be a clash, and even as my mind is rolling on to the end of the sentence I am vaguely aware of it sending a memo to my fingers, "double-m, remember" - and bless them, they did listen. They typed 'dammned'. And see above, the first line of this paragraph, where I said I needed to type the word 'dammed'? They did it again there. And very nearly here also, I actually had to pause after that double-m.

Petty pleasures, I know, but pleasures none the less.

And if any of you are thinking "Chaz, stop typing about typing and get on with typing the book," well, hell, I typed two pages before breakfast. I am giving someone an out-of-body experience, untroubled by hand-eye coordination or any other physical limitations. Ah, wish-fulfilment; this is why we type...

I used to say I was a typist, when people asked at parties. And I used to have a copy of Herman Melville's 'Typee' when I was at school, which was surprisingly popular among my classmates; not, I fancy, for the deathless prose, so much as the half-naked woman who adorned it. Ah, '70s covers...

Comments

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

My fingers do that too. Whenever I need to type a word beginning corn... (like corner) I almost invariably (even when typing this I had to concentrate very hard) start to type cornw... and the letters ...ell all too often follow by magic before I know what I've done.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mm-hmm. It's interesting, tho' - we type our own names far less often than we used to. I can still do it on auto-pilot - but I think that's only because I began in the days of steam, I spent ten years typing my own name and address on every letter and every page of every manuscript and every return envelope. The first computer - '84, or thereabouts - took away the need, the automations of email have almost taken away the opportunity; how often do I type it now? A couple of times a month, perhaps? But there is legacy in fingers, they can still do it. We may be the last generation that does...