Learned a new word today, which perhaps I should’ve known, that I felt I’d been waiting all my life to come across: bouma.

A short time ago I was using this line on my business site: “People don’t read”. If she ever saw it, this surely earned the ire of my former boss, the copy director for a major U.S. retailer. What I meant by it was not so much that people are not reading the beautiful language we so painstakingly composed, so much as they are scanning shapes more than anything else — understanding bigger things to be more important than smaller things and so on. That they are, in effect, consuming boumas like Pac-Man.

Suggested reading:
– The Science of Word Recognition — or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma
– Bouma – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia