Isnât this to avoid the awkward situation where autocorrect guesses the totally wrong word for the situation?
Sorry Mom, I canât come with you for the walk today, because of all of the rape. (autocorrect for rain).
My thought exactly, I think this is perfectly reasonable. Also, damnyouautocorrect.com.
Iâm sure this is simply to keep sites like Damn You, AutoCorrect! from being even more embarrassing. I once texted a friend that I was in D.C. and riding the Metro over to see him. My iPhone changed Metro to negro. I really wish it hadnât done that.
Iâve been noticing something similar on my Android phone. Swipe-typing "goodâ almost always resolves to âGodâ (with a capital G); even the mildest swear words wonât get accepted via swipe-typing, except for âHellâ (which again, always capitalises). Short words like âgodsâ can get messed up too. It appears their standard model for a North American is a conservative Christian who uses their phone to write sermons.
I find it amusing that Android finds it easier to believe I want to type âGodâ than âgoodâ, but overall itâs pretty annoying. Near as I can tell from the behaviour, it seems like they chose to pander to the group most likely to scream about it, with the rest having to put up with it.
No, itâs to avoid controversial and âsensitiveâ words. Including, infuriatingly enough, ones like âabortionâ that are only âsensitiveâ because conservative assholes insist on making them so. I wonder if Appleâs autocomplete avoids âglobal warmingâ and âclimate changeâ too.
Sheâs all bruised, but my sisterâs gymnast boyfriend finally got her in to the abortion.
I mean contortion. It doesnât matter if you are pro-choice or not, there are words that should be spelled correctly.
Occamâs razor time, folks: which is more likely, that Apple thinks it can eradicate social ills by programming their autocomplete not to assume certain words, or that Apple doesnât want me accidentally texting these words to my boss/partner/grandma?
But think about the poor drunkards when they try to drunk-text! This is when you need auto-correct the most! It isnât as convincing when you text back âNo, Iâm not a druknerdâ
âInfuriatingâ?
Come now. âMildy annoying,â OK, but my personal reservoir of fury isnât deep enough to waste on trivialities such as this.
They put this in there to piss off people who get mad at anything.
I just tried swyping âabortionâ on my Android device and it worked like a charm. And considering the controversy around Siri when you tried asking about abortions, I wouldnât be so quick to give Apple an easy out like damnyouautocorrect. Besides, the funniest autocorrects donât necessitate sensitive words, just the wrong word for the situation.
Occamâs razor tells me that Apple puts stuff like this into their software just to see if they can get Cory enraged.
[quote=âAndBobando, post:13, topic:4223â]
I just tried swyping âabortionâ on my Android device and it worked like a charm.
[/quote]Swype isnât the same thing as autocomplete. The suggestions that pop up for Swype only appear up after youâve spelled out (or attempted to spell out) the entire word. Itâs the deviceâs best guess at what youâve already written, not what you might intend to write based on the first few letters.
The very first thing I did when I got an iPhone was to turn off autocorrect. I think I had read too many of those joke websites showing it correcting âepi penâ to âepic penisâ.
If youâre going to text words like âabortionâ, you should probably care enough about what you have to say to not need the autocorrect. For most of us, thatâs not a casual conversation kind of word that you just dash off quickly while youâre in line at the grocery store. There are probably a few people who use those terms frequently in their day to day conversation. People who are deeply involved in abortion related causes or abortion providers might use âabortionâ daily. People who are avid hunters or gun activists or sporting goods salesmen might use âammoâ and âbulletâ all the time. But for most of us, theyâre not such a common part of our conversations that we need them autocorrected for ease and speed all the time.
If your friend gets a response to her text about when youâre going to be coming over and it says âIn a couple of hours. Iâm busy getting an abortiom.â, her response isnât going to be to the misplaced âmâ, itâs going to be toward the content. If youâre having a politically charged conversation about abortion, you should care enough about the ideas youâre sharing to spend a second proofreading before you send. If you canât be bothered to spend a second checking it, itâs too lame and careless for anyone to spend their second reading it.
I can also see it helping keep folks from unnecessarily getting flagged as terrorists or criminals. Iâd hate to have it autocorrect so that it sounded like I was loading up a bunch of ammo.
Sure, but the principle is the same, in terms of the âbut what if I text something embarrassing by accident!â defence. Swype could have chosen not to include âabortionâ in their dictionary just like autocomplete didnât. I had to teach Swype a ton of swear words, for example.
It might be cool if they added a special feature to the autocorrect that flagged all of a list of sensitive words before you send. It would make it so that if something had autocorrected to a naughty word or a potentially offensive topic word that it would highlight it to give you an extra heads up that the word was there. That would be beautiful protection against autocorrect horrors as well as ones you mistyped that it saw as actual words. Iâve sent texts with the word âassâ in place of âasâ a couple of times. That would help catch those,too.
Yeah, if I text that âIâve spent all morning reading about abolitionâ, or âI canât chat now, I need to go for my ablutionsâ and autocorrect swaps in âabortionâ - that could lead to some folks getting unnecessarily worried about my well-being.
For that reason, Iâve turned off autocorrect altogether on my phone - Iâd rather have people realize Iâm a lousy typist, than think Iâm good at typing and also rude.
But âThe shrimp made me swell up like a balloon! Thank God I was able to jab myself with an epic penisâ is, maybe, the best text you could ever sendâŚ
