For the past year or so, I have had a few episodes of doubtfulness when reading or writing. From these activities, I can have trouble reading between the lines to infer the meaning of a text or struggle to structure ideas when composing an article. But this is quite normal, and it doesn't bother me. In truth, my greatest internal struggle comes down to the spelling of alien words like strategic.
How does this happen? I would look at a word, or write a word, and in the process of doing so I would stop to think how weird it was spelled. And the word would be nothing close to the complexity of other words like "reminiscence" or "rendezvous", but it would be as simple as "break" or "shell". In the beginning, I did not think much of the few times this happened to me, but recently I wanted to write the word "strategic" and had a mental conflict as I was writing S, T, R, A, T, E, G—"Wait," I said to myself. "Am I writing it right? Should it not be S, T, R, A, T, I, G, I,C. No this can't be. Let me try and spell 'strategy'." Spells strategy right. "This can't be!" And being at a loss, I thought there was something wrong with me, and decided to finally do a google search on what I had experienced. Lo and behold, I was not the only one. There were plenty of articles online on it. They called it wordnesia.
Wordnesia is a phenomenon where our brains trip on the spelling of a simple, common word. From what I understood, our brains are often on autopilot when working with language, but if we stop for once to think twice about what we are reading/writing, our brains could throw a 500 error code. Until this day, people don't know what causes wordnesia, or understand the science behind it.
Now, before I found out about this, I believed that my habitual use of the German language was the culprit. This was because I recalled that I only started tripping on English words after I started learning the German language. I thought what was happening was that my German goggles would slip on when I looked at some English words, making them look weird in comparison to how they sounded in my head. To elaborate, the letter "i" in German is pronounced like the letter "e" in English, and "e" in German is pronounced like "a" in English. So what is "a" in German like? "z"? No. It sounds like the Wilhelm scream. But I digress. When I looked at the word strategic, the "e" there could have thrown me off as sounding like the German "e", and in which case the German "i" seemed more appropriate there.
After having learned about wordnesia, and not hearing anyone talk about multilingualism as a factor, I have been thinking, what if multilingualism is a factor? Especially languages that use similar alphabets. I am interested to see cases whether there is actually a correlation between multilingual individuals and wordnesia. I know correlation does not mean causation, but it would still be interesting to see who experiences wordnesia the most, and under which circumstances.
Until I understand how to avoid wordnesias, my strategy is to use sesquipedalian lexicon whereby I will transcribe my abstruse imaginations into decipherable stanzas.
Hot take: I think German words are generally easier to pronounce and spell than English words.