Damn You Auto-Collorectal: Or, How to Punk Yo Mama’s iPhone

I get mad at the auto-correct on my iPhone when I text. It twists. It mangles. It un-cutes cute spellings and it cutes things that shouldn’t be cute. Like when Mr. B. texted me after a November bike commute that he almost froze his “button off.” It wierds things up. Sometimes I want to use non-standard spellings. If I want to spell “kuh-razy” like so, well then I want to spell “kuh-razy” like so. I’ll admit it’s not very kuh-lassy of me, but it’s my beeswax. Don’t judge me, iPhone.

And of course I need to use words that aren’t in my phone’s meager little dictionary. If I want to text, “Zipadeedoodah,” it’s because I want to text, “Zipadeedoodah.” I’m not going to type a 13-letter word by accident and I resent having it auto-corrected to “Zips Dewdrops,” so that I have to type it all over again.

If I’m on my way to Athabasca, it’s not helpful to have my message corrected to “on my way to Arty Tabasco.”

Why, iPhone? Why do you continually correct my, “I love you texts,” to read: “I live you.” To whom would I say that?

But at the same time, I do appreciate the technology of predictive texting. I.e. when your phone uses it’s “intelligence” to guess what you’re going to say to save you the time of having to type it. Stephen Hawkings says it has allowed him to communicate twice as fast and that he wouldn’t be able to continue to lecture and write articles without it. He said this, mind you, in the same Guardian article in which he said Artificial Intelligence might predictively spell the end of the human race. Maybe. Or maybe A.I. will spell the end of the human rice.

A confession: I am a huge fan of DamnYouAutoCorrect.com. This website is dedicated to unintentionally hilarious auto-correct fails. I think it’s the funniest thing on the internet. I laugh until I cry. I just do. It features such gems as:

Oh, I know. I know. “Naked Pastor.” But I just can’t help laughing and laughing and laughing. It’s a love hate thing. I hate when predictive texting makes me write dumb things but I love it when it makes other people say dumb things.  And I also loved it when auto-correct auto-corrected my text in which I cursed auto-correct to:

… I laughed for twenty-two minutes. Why is auto-colorectal in my phone’s dictionary? OMG. Clearly it’s there just to make me belly laugh until I’m 10 months younger. The auto-colorectal incident reminded me how much I loved spending time on damnyouautocorrect.com which is where I discovered this:

McWrap posted this to her Tumblr Feed. She changed every word she could think of in her mom’s keyboard shortcuts to “nugget.” Oh my. This is just a game changer for auto-correct fail lovers everywhere. Did I laugh? Oh I laughed. And of course I told Mr. B and our darling daughter all about it, and the more I pictured Emily’s mom’s flubber-gastedness at this strange new technology her digital-native daughter was using against her, the harder I laughed. So of course, while I was busy laughing at this stranger, Mr. B and our D.D. went into another room with my iPhone and set it to predictively text “Nugget” whenever I typed “Th”; to substitute “i am poop” for “the” as well as “doing”; “Rutabaga” for “kids”; and “fat bug in a rug in a jug” for “you.”

So when my friend got back from Prague I told her that I’d love to hear about her trip. But it came out this way:

It took me weeks to fix it too. Not because it’s hard to fix, but because I seem to only text when I’m in a hurry and don’t have time just now to figure out how to change my keyboard shortcut settings. Well.

Now come on. Does yo mama, who birthed you, and fed you, and clothed you, and cared for you from infancy deserve this sort of treatment?  If so, here’s an instructable on how to do it:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Best-iPhone-Prank-Ever/

Merry Christmas,

The Flurfels