Why Can You Raed Tihs So Esaliy?

      A researcher at Cambridge University had an idea about how the human brain reads words. Eventually, he realized that even if the word's letters are rearranged, as long as the first and last letters were in the correct place that the word could be easily read. The human brain is still able to easily recognize the word. Other people started realizing the same thing to when they were faced with passages like this. For example, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. This specific passage was taken from the Cognition and Brains Science Unit (MRC) of the United Kingdom. The above panel from the second part to Maus is from page 58. In this panel, the word "selektion" is used instead of "selection". "Selektion" is a very similar to the word "skeleton" since it has almost the same exact letters and the first and last letters are the same. Spiegelman used "selektion" many times as he was describing this scene and how people would be selected and sorted into different groups very often. Each time I read "seleketion", I always thought it said "skeleton". Only after seeing it a couple more times and noticing the fact that the word "skeleton" didn't really fit Spiegleman was trying to say did I realize that it said "selektion". It is very obvious that he did this on purpose. In this specific panel all the Jews are completely white and each drawing of them have line marks to represent how skinny and bony there are, just like a skeleton. Everyone else is wearing clothes are are shaded in darker which is in a stark contrast against the Jews. Spiegelman deliberately uses an icon of skeleton in order to truly convey the atrocities that the Jews had to face during this time period. Just like McCloud states on page 27 of his book, "Icon is an image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea," and this image of the Jews clearly represents the image of a skeleton. They are basically already dead because of all their emotional and physical suffering. Spiegelman effectively accompanies this illustration with the word "selektion" to even further represent the Jews as real skeletons and how much the holocaust took away from them.