I honestly forget who at this point, but I think a few people still believe that I met my wife during a brief educational stay in her home state, when in fact it was online and years later.

Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The “wrong” word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener’s comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.

Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing “libraries” of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.