Someone on Twitter pointed me to Damn You Auto Correct, a site that’s at least as narrow in focus as your average LOLCats site, but pretty funny nevertheless. I suppose it’s useful mostly as a warning not to invite someone over for gelato unless you’ve really thought things through. Then again, anyone who’s listened to Benjamen Walker’s 13th episode of Too Much Information, where an innocuous text message to a notoriously cranky rock star is transformed into a curt insult by autocorrect. Suffice it to say, I’ve never since typed “NP. Thanks so much” on my iPhone again.
It does seem like the manufacturers of autocorrect should keep up with the times in editing their dictionaries, realizing that “NP” has become pretty common slang and to find a different way to correct misspellings without alienating quick-fingered radio producers and SMSing computer scientists. And then I remembered a routine from British comics Armstrong and Miller:
The key phrase for me: “Our job, Gilbert, is to offer people not the words they do use but the words they should use.”
And you thought technology was value neutral…