Though at times we pound our tiny screens screaming that autocorrect must have sprung full-grown from the forehead of Satan, this devil’s spawn actually has a long history, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus recounted it recently in Wired. The mistakes are shared, sometimes hilarious, and may eventually bring back proofreading, but maybe not.
According to Lewis-Kraus, “the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are.” He believes they’ve enabled us to text so much, we of the “podgy fingers” and dimmest memories of sixth grade spelling tests. Our tiny keypads are possible “only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.” Then, in a scary revelation, Lewis-Kraus admits he typed the whole first draft of his book (doesn’t say which) on a phone.
(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)
Then man behind autocorrect is Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. He began his Microsoft career in the early 1990’s on the Word team and wanted to make typing “sleek and invisible.” His crew began with enabling fixes for common typing errors, which is why every time I abbreviate electronic health record EHR, Word “fixes” it for me. (And, yes, I’ve tried to add EHR it to my personal dictionary.) And there were consequences. Hachamovitch spoke to his daughter’s third-grade class and showed the youngsters how to make auto-fixes, and afterward received parental emails saying things like, “Thanks, but whenever I try to type my daughter’s name it automatically transforms into ‘the pretty princess.’”
Autocorrect’s developers went with primary spellings (judgment, not judgement—take that, Brits!), declined to give suggestions for correct spelling of vulgarities (ignore them), released their baby, and soon laid bare its eccentricities. Linguist now use the word cupertino as a term of art for autocorrection with incorrect words, after older spellcheckers repeatedly replaced “cooperation” with the name of Apple’s home town. Regrettably, my own last name (“Weisfeld”) more than once went out on the bottom of letters with its automatic replacement “Weaseled.”
Don’t abandon hope. Improvements still coming. Meanwhile, here’s the Damn You Autocorrect Hall of Fame.
