Words that become Wronger, the Longer You Look at Them

Ferlonda gave me a handy segue to my next topic, which is normal everyday words that suddenly look...funny. Maybe you just look at it suddenly and it doesn't seem quite right. Or maybe you've looked at it so much, it begins to look ridiculous. (As opposed to words that NEVER look right, like shriek or segue...)

That's what happened to me when working on my menu to: Chicken. Go ahead, type it a hundred or so times in different sentences. Pick up several cookbooks devoted to it and suddenly it starts wavering in and out existence as a real word and begins to look...absurd.

Cookie is another one. I suspect it's the whole "c" and "k" thing.

Friend. Which of course is just one letter removed from Fiend. Which is a word that NEVER looks right. But the "Frie" part starts wandering away from the "nd" part and then my head starts pronouncing it wrong and suddenly, I'm running spell check on a word that I KNOW how to spell.

Quarter. But we're back to that "k" sound again...

Which I might believe is the issue until I look at Sales, which always looks like a foreign word to me. And I then suspect that it has nothing to do with the word itself, but misfiring neuron.

Neuron...

Focus! Focus!