Wow! This is really illustrates a theme of the talk. I was completely blind to the 2nd "the", even the first two times I read your follow-up comment.

I'm glad you mentioned it. There's lots of evidence (even from the emails I've been getting) that most people might be skimming even sentences and guessing, rather than actually reading the words. This could partly be from the way they test reading in schools, and partly from the oral nature of most writed (e.g Twitter) on the web.