Of all the things I love about my iPhone, one of my most favourite is the autocorrect function, the gadget’s ability to intuit the word you want to type, just a letter or two in. Among the words autocorrect has correctly spelled for me are risotto, tryptophan, soufflé, maraschino, USAID, and Huxley.
True, autocorrect has its foibles. After almost a year of iPhone ownership, it only now has begun to recognise my name, despite the dozens of emails sent out daily over my sig. The device can be overly fond of contractions and prudish about profanity. Thus its becomes it’s, hell turns into he’ll, and fuckers for some reason is rendered as duckers.
The Times‘ David Pogue solicited the Twitterverse to draw up a list of some of autocorrect’s worst bloopers. As he notes, when autocorrect is wrong, “it can be really wrong.” Among some of the laugh-outloud submissions:
- Type “aww” using Word on a Nokia phone, and you get “byzantine.”
- iPhone corrected “Sorry about your fever” to “Sorry about your feces.” iPhone enjoys sophomoric humor.
- Brand-new phone. I started typing “medical,” and after 4 letters, it wanted to correct to “Jedi.”
- I texted a female coworker once, “Come over for a sec,” and it autocorrected to “Come over for a sex.” Was my face red!
. - If you tell your wife “nah,” the iPhone calls her a “nag.”
[...] seems that I am not alone in my love-hate relationship with auto-correct, especially its tendency to neuter profanity (really, is Apple a bunch of [...]