Auto-mis-Corrections

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

We’re long past the point where there’s any humor left in making fun of the spellcheck on programs like Microsoft Word, right?

Oh, I still titter over it.

But I think there’s still some humor left in the cell phone auto-corrections.

Oh, those, yeah.

There was a great story a number of weeks ago in the New York Times by my friend and colleague Ben Zimmer, who now writes the On Language column for the New York Times, and he wrote about auto-incorrections.

These are the crazy things where, well, you mean to type one thing, but something else comes out of the phone, and you look a little silly on the other end because you send the text message without realizing it, right?

Right.

So we put the word out, you and I did, on Facebook and on Twitter, asking our listeners, you, if you had something to tell us about some auto-incorrection that your phone made.

And we got a couple of great ones.

Liz told us that her friend Lorna’s name is often changed to porno, which I thought was great.

Poor Lorna.

The user Agonist, that’s his Twitter nickname, told us that his BlackBerry changed C-S-E-E to R-A-R-E.

So he kept saying things like, I are what you mean.

Which is not quite right.

But I think the winner and my all-time favorite so far came from Erling Mork in Norway, who reports that his iPhone changed where the wild things are to where the wild thongs are.

I don’t think it’s in Norway.

I don’t either.

Oh, technology.

What folly.

Oh, sometimes those smartphones just aren’t so smart, right?

They learn, though.

And that’s the thing that Microsoft Word still doesn’t do.

You can add words to its dictionary, but it’s not automatically looking at your language and picking up on the words that you use and then suggesting them.

I mean, there’s this great market, at least on the Android operating system, for keyboards that are more in tune to you.

They’ll analyze your text messages, figure out which words you use most commonly, and they’ll suggest those first.

It’s wonderful.

It’s freaky.

But it takes a while, right?

It takes a while for it to kick in.

So here’s your assignment.

Send us your auto-end corrections.

What is your phone doing to your language?

How’s it messing it up?

Send them to words@waywordradio.org.

Post them on our Facebook page at Wayword Radio.

Send them to us on Twitter at the username Wayword or call us 877-929-9673.