A: If you guessed "the 2012 election results," you're correct… for 89.2% of the population.  But the red states in this map are actually those that allow corporal punishment in schools.  That's probably not a coincidence.

KCNA version: "He sang a song reflecting his reverence for Kim Jong Un, touching the spectators."

In 2014, having forgotten the earlier conversation, I had a conversation with the same friend about whether, if it were possible, each of us would switch bodies with the other to find out which of our crippling medical conditions was more tolerable.

I think that pretty much sums up the human condition, dunnit?

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can't Read, which argued that English-speaking children should be taught to read using phonics.  At the time, most American schools taught whole word recognition: kids would learn that the word net meant "net" without it being explained that the n made the "n" sound and the e made the "ehh" sound and the t made the "t" sound.  As a consequence, when these kids encountered the written word ten, they had no idea what spoken word it could possibly correspond to.  Why are we acting like English words are Chinese ideograms?, Flesch asked.  The advantage of an alphabetic system is that once you've learned the alphabet, you've instantly unlocked every word in the language (though admittedly English has more than a few irregularities to take into account).  His argument was hugely influential, and my generation was taught how to read by Sesame Street and The Electric Company, which used phonics.

All that said — literate adults don't actually use phonics when they read!  They use whole word recognition.  You glance at the word, you instantly take in its length and its shape, and you know what word it is.  That's why it's so easy to miss typos — there's not a whole lot of visual difference between a correctly-spelled word and the same word with a missng letter or with a couple of letters trasnposed.  But when the change is enough to change the basic shape of the word, it's a problem.  The studies I've read have suggested that intelligibility depends on the first and last letters being correct and with the word being roughly the correct length; having ascenders and descenders where they're expected is also a big help.  When literate adults are reading along and encounter the word you, their brains immediately recognize it as the second person pronoun and take that into account when decoding the meaning of the sentence.  But when they encounter the non-word u, that doesn't happen as quickly.  It doesn't have the right length and shape.  A texter might say, "But it's shorter and it sounds the same!" — but the point is that the sound doesn't matter.  If you're sounding out what you read, rather than taking in the words at a glance, then you're not actually fully literate yet.  Phonics are a great tool for learning to read, the same way that training wheels are a great tool for learning to ride a bike — in both cases, you eventually toss out the crutch.  Yes, you can protest that as recently as the 18th century people spelled words any damned way they pleased, but again, that's kind of the point — the reason that orthography became standardized is that that shit was harder to read than it had to be.  Sticking to standards makes reading effortless, even unconscious.  Deviating from them soon makes reading unbearable, like those Victorian novels full of uncorrected dialect.

So, back to this tweet.  It could have been really funny!  The fact that the word Eagles refers both to a successful musical act and to a largely unsuccessful football team is a fun coincidence, and this joke exploits it well.  But that's just the thing.  The word Eagles refers to both those things.  The non-word #eagles doesn't refer to either.  The fact that the capital E is missing means that word recognition doesn't happen instantaneously — it takes a fraction of a second to analyze the string and process that, ah, it's the word "Eagles", only rendered as a tag.  This leads to two problems.  First, "this is a tag" is a piece of information that is irrelevant in this context and interferes with the meaning: the tag "#eagles" is neither a musical act nor a football team.  It's a tag.  Second, even putting that aside — that split second of "wait, what's that word?" undermines the joke purely by interfering with the timing.  It's the written equivalent of a stand-up comedian stumbling over or mispronouncing the key word in the punch line.  Sure, a fraction of a moment later you get what the comedian meant to say, but that fraction of a moment is the difference between an actual laugh and an "Ah, yes, very amusing."