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Auto Incorrect
theodp writes "Combine smartphone auto correction and fat-fingered virtual keyboard typing, writes Rob Walker, and the results can be hilarious and even shocking. The website Damn You, Autocorrect collects the awesomely embarrassing text messages that you never meant to send. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to masturbate some chicken for bisexuals night!"
...have led to some clbuttic mistakes.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It took only two and a half months for this to get on /., it's yesterday's news tomorrow, as usual.
U+F8FF
Wow, this site is great, don't think I've cried this much laughing since bash.org!
Welcome to last year, /.
/. How can I contact your advertising department to get a sponsored pidt like this one?
I think the autocorrect learns from what you type, so they may still be genuine, although I don't doubt many are fake.
"Hey I'm heading to DC tomorrow, any chance for VIP tickets to the Whitehouse"?
The problem was, Whitehouse autocorrected to 'Whorehouse'. I didn't realize this until the next day. My rep had a sense of humor when I deleted that tweet and sent another the next day (apologizing for the first)... Something like "Very peculiar typo"..
I rely on autocorrect because I want to type faster than 1 WPM and I have trouble always pressing the proper "key" on a screen that's A) virtual and B) way too small to really type on. It's not because I'm an idiot who can't spell. See the difference?
Nice try, and the elitism in your post will get your post modded up, but this isn't a problem limited to the illiterate, or those with a lackadaisical attitude to spelling and grammar. My Droid's touch-screen keyboard's keys are close together and a combination of mis-hit keys and auto-correct/auto-complete means that, if I hadn't proof-read them, some strange messages would have been sent. If I were in a hurry, or not concentrating, it's easy to imagine that even the most egregious example from damnyouautocorrect.com could come from my 'phone. So what's next? Are you now going to rail on the hasty and those with fat fingers?
No doubt you have a pretty strong opinion about people who send texts like "ur l8. where r u?". You know what, I've used the contraction "ur" and replaced "to" with "2" and "you" with "u". Not because I hate the English language, or am intrinsically lazy, but because I've had to revise a message down to fit into a 140 character limit. Do I deserve your ire too?
(I've seen a few on there, e.g. "vag" instead of "bag" that, as you say, are clearly just adjacent-key errors but there are some genuine auto-correct/auto-complete howlers on there)
which would have unfortunate implications for people who typed "masturbate" and "bisexual" etc, if the phone is picking the more frequently used possibility.
If you cancel the autocorrect two or three times, it adds the word to its dictionary. I had to do it for a bunch of words because iOS doesn't offer a Canadian English autocorrect dictionary. Of course, if you spell something terribly wrong and cancel the correction, it'll up an decide that it only needs you to do it once.