Auto Correct doesn’t have much faith in us humans.
There, right there! I just barely get started and you try to turn us into US. Like a little nationalism with your condescension?
I’m a professional writer and have been for 30 years. And yet here I am being told by a tablet what I really meant to say.
It’s kind of galling.
No I didn’t mean gallons, dammit!
Really?
You changed dammit into family? So I had to go back twice to correct it.
It was particularly aggravating when I was playing online Scrabble a couple days ago with a friend who secretes 80-point, seven-letter words at will. He had just left me in the dust with his latest gem and took to the messaging window to “apologize”.
So I tried to create a new compound word for him: scrabbhole.
Only the Kindle Fire was having none of it.
It kept changing it to scar, scrapbook, scrappy, ska, Scrappy Do and other wrong guesses. Worse yet, my frustrated XXL fingers kept hitting ‘send’, so my friend undoubtedly thinks I was having a seizure.
It makes me wonder, would Auto Correct have kept Kurt Vonnegut from inventing words?
What about Shakespeare? He invented words we’re still using today.
I’m not at all comparing myself to those guys. But it does make you wonder how language can continue to evolve if a computer program can try to tell you that your new word is no good.
Vonnegut would’ve had fits trying to write about his fictional religious leader Bokonon without it getting turned into bikini or Solomon.
And Shakespeare would’ve had a heck of a time trying to thumb in equivocal on his iPhone if it kept thinking he was trying to say equipment.
Not to mention colloquialisms and dialog words meant to keep things real and conversational.
In other words, if I Wanda say Honda, I’m Conan.
I mean, if I wanna say gonna, I’m gonna.
Carr Jam 