Anyone idly browsing the Internet recently might well have come across the following mysterious passage: "Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry word is in the crcreot ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy."

It looks like a foreign language or code, or sheer nonsense, doesn't it? And yet, most readers find that, surprisingly, it's a snap to interpret: "According to an English university study the order of letters in a word doesn't matter, the only thing that's important is that the first and last letter of every word is in the correct position. The rest can be jumbled and one is still able to read the text without difficulty."

It hardly seems to matter that no one has been able to track down that alleged university study, making this yet another example of an Internet-driven fad, like flash mobs or falsely attributed commencement speeches -- phenomena that are only tenuously rooted in reality.