The rest of our alphabet has similar ancient beginnings in basic natural line segments and shapes. English letters are composed of single or combined vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and curved lines that our brain's visual system innately recognizes—and that our language system learns to associate with phonemes in elementary school.

Rapid object recognition depends more on the outer shape of something than on the inner (often quite variant) details—and something that works for an object also works nicely for a word composed of two outer and several inner letters.

Recall that you easily read According when it was spelled as Aoccdrnig above, but the same letters spelled as Cacordign would be unreadable, even though only the first and final two letters of the word are reversed.

By connecting innately meaningless sounds to innately meaningless lines within our incredibly inventive brain, we developed a marvelously meaningful language-driven civilization.

But alas, we didn't follow up on this brain property and invent a computer that could similarly recognize the external essence of an email address and ignore incorrect internal letter sequences. My most recent email message was rejected because although the first and final letters on the address were correct, two internal letters were reversed. I corrected the error and resent the message—feeling a bit superior.