Word Weirdness

For many years I'd thought that it was just me who suffered from this quite stupid thing. Recent research indicates that I'm not alone. But I'd like to find out more, whether it's just weird people or if everyone goes through the turmoil.

It's a phenomenon I think I might call word weirdness, as that sums it up in an all encompassing way, and it happens to me exactly once every once in a while, or so.

I steam my way through life, as most of us do, reading, writing and rithmeticking and often do all of them without paying any attention to the processes involved. I drive into work in the morning and notice that driving has become one of those tasks that I can do without paying any attention to.

I'm at the level that a wise man told me once is called "unconscious competence", which simply means that I'm competent at it, so much so that I don't have to think about it. I'm at that level in driving, not everything by any means.

The art of writing is something that's relatively new to me and, as many would say, I'm trying. But I can claim to be good at spelling, shit like that. I always was, just without knowing what on earth to do with the vast vocabulary I was building up in my head.

Yet, every once in a while I get this word weirdness. It's when I start to focus on an everyday word, maybe because of a momentary glitch during which I wonder how to spell it, and the word springs out on me and starts to look different.

Last week it happened with "because". I wrote it down somewhere, stared at it and it sprung to life and began to look as if it was a word in a foreign language, as if it was alien to me and spelt weirdly. Now "because" is a nice everyday word that looks warm and friendly, there's nothing strange to it at all.

I was chatting to a friend about the phenomenon recently and she said that exactly the same thing happens to her. This was a reassuring discovery for both of us. We now exist with the knowledge that we're not alone as we battle through life struggling with word weirdness.

Does does anyone else out there experience this as well?