The Daily Mail has a piece today on unwitting, but amusing, errors made by smartphones' tendency to wrongly predict the word you are typing. Most of the examples given are obviously made up, and very contrived, but these errors do happen. Modern phones apparently take account of the words you use most often and tend to assume that that is what you mean when you type the first couple of letters of a word. So, if you use the word 'kill' more often than 'kiss', you might surprise a friend when you tell him about taking a girl out and kissing her. Examples offered by readers in the comments include a woman who was bemused to be addressed as 'big lips' in her nightly text from her boyfriend, until he told her that what he had meant to say was 'big kiss'.
On a traditional mobile phone where each number key represents three or four letters, you are unlikely to be offered kill for kiss, as they involve different number keys, but there are many textonyms around ie words which are produced using the same number keys. So, press 7663 and possible words are some, Rome, roof, pond, and others. 7378378 produces both request and pervert, and 2276243 could be barmaid or carnage.
The examples given in the article are humorous and harmless. However, there was a case earlier this year where someone killed a friend over a misspelt text message. He had meant to write 'mutter' but his friend read 'nutter'.
Funny piece.
Therein lies the reason I've got that feature turned off; makes me crazy. Quite simply, it is easier to key text properly to begin with than to proof-read and correct all of the autotext errors.
Posted by: John | July 29, 2011 at 08:06 PM
I agree, John. I also find that the dictionary always offers strange suggestions - I can't imagine anyone would be texting about such subjects.
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | July 31, 2011 at 07:28 PM
some time it is hard to get the right response
Posted by: eboard | August 15, 2011 at 03:01 PM