OnlinePoekr

The following question was posed of me one afternoon: if you typed "onlinepoker" fast and mistyped it, what do you think it would look like?

onlinepoekr.
onlinepokr.
onlinepeork.
onlineporke.
onlinepoerk.

Those were my actual attempts to mistype the word by not using my head. And then, I started intentionally figuring out typos.

I can explain. You see, the "er" is unlikely to ever be reversed into "re", because they're triggered by the same hand, so the finger sequence will probably be preserved in any misspelling. But that "k" is typed with the other (right) hand, so it could be early or late; that is, before or after the "er".

poker
poekr
poerk

The "po" is triggered off the right, and it's the beginning of the word, so no problems there. I guess the clinch is when the "k" is supposed to come out: if your left and right hands are slightly out of sync, you get those letter combinations. You know, like if your left hand is eager to type and can't wait for the right hand to be done. It happens.

The "online" part has fewer possible unsync's because it's mostly right-hand-side work. And because it's a separate word from the poker part, I don't think one would have many errors of having the "e" creep late into "poker", but that could happen too.

onlinpeoker

Something like that. But then, I noticed something else.

The "po" is above the home row, so the "k" can appear late in the game; after your right hand bats out "po", your middle finger needs to drop back down to home row to get at the "k", and that takes a little longer. So if your left hand isn't waiting long enough, it will type its "er" before the "k" gets in.

Sh!t, this is pretty cool. Huh. I was pretty impressed with myself for having a logical approach to that. [beam] (I was less impressed with having nothing better to do than to analyze this silly problem.)