Textonym

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well. Who’s this?

This is Mark, and I’m from Poway, California.

Hello, Mark. Welcome.

Hi, Mark.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Thank you. Listen, I appreciate what you do and, you know, love the power of language and the fact that I can utter a couple of things. The next thing you know, you have a pretty good idea what I meant in general.

Oh, yeah.

Right, yeah.

But it’s come to my attention that not only do I mumble in person, and I seem to stutter on my text messaging as well, so I need a word to cover me on this.

You stutter. How do you do that?

Well, you know the predictive texting.

Mm-The T9?

The T9 predictive texting, yes. You’re thumbing your way through there, or two-thumbing your way through there, and your phone is filling in any possible combination of words, hopefully in the order that you might want to use them.

So like if I’m trying to put in home, the first thing that tends to come up is good. And then I have to somehow squint. Of course, I wouldn’t do this driving, but I am 50 years old, and it’s a pretty small screen. And a lot of times I just assume it knows that I mean home, so I keep going.

So I send off these messages like, you know, I’ll see you at good later. And then, you know, most of us kind of understand now that, oh, yeah, yeah, he means home.

So I’m looking for a word to describe this particular problem, aside from inept.

Don’t use inept.

No, I don’t think we were going there. But, Mark, you’re talking about the way that phones can guess what you’re going to type, correct?

Yes.

Yeah.

They have an autocomplete function, which tries to fill it in to save you from typing the rest of the word.

Yeah, so people do understand what you mean. So it seems like it’s a phenomenon, therefore it should be described in a single word.

Okay.

There we go, the single word phenomenon. It’s not auto-complete so much as it’s auto-corrupt, right? You put that one on the list.

That could be a good one. And, you know, as a service, I, of course, have polled a number of my friends. We have some serving suggestions here that might work.

So here’s the list as of today. So the cinetextic. So you know, synonym, cinetext.

Okay, sure.

Dystextic. So these are all describing the person as distextic.

Okay.

I received a cinetextic message from Mark. Another one of your cinetextic messages.

Okay.

We also have textlexic.

Okay, okay.

I want to tell you, there’s a word out there that is already being used for the mistyped words themselves.

Okay.

And they’re being called textonyms.

Ew.

And that word has been around for about five or six years. And so if you meant word A and you get word B, if you meant home but you get good, then good is a textonym.

Oh, that makes sense.

I like mine better, of course.

Oh, of course you do. I think the easier ones to say are have a better chance of succeeding. Like, this is sinotextic. That’s pretty easy to say, right? Or cinetextic. Or synonyms. Otherwise, it’s like my English came out in Chinese.

Mark, we’re going to play around with these suggestions you’ve got. We’ll put them out to the world at large, and we’ll see if any of them take hold. And maybe in a few years, synotext or dystextic or the other choices will be the words that people use when they describe that situation.

Who knows? It’s certainly worth a shot.

Hey, Mark.

It’s my big chance at fame.

That’s it?

Well, Mark, it was home to talk to you.

Yeah.

It was really home. You sound like a book fellow.

Thanks for calling.

Home by.

Home by.

Bye-bye.

You know, sometimes home and good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They are interchangeable on there.

Oh, my.

1-877-929-9673.

Hey, you know, Martha, people can call us when we are not on the air, too.

It’s amazing.

Yeah, 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D. Or send it any time of day or night to words@waywordradio.org.