autoconniption... uh, autocorrection
EVER HAD an embarrassing moment thanks to autocorrective devices and programs? Join the club.
Quite a while back, on a widely-used and well-known social media channel, I posted my ramblings about shaking hands with someone. Unfortunately, and to the great amusement of everyone else, my post looked like this:
My husband can testify to the fact that I have a hate-hate relationship with autocorrect (AC) ever since it was invented, and often find myself cursing the program that inserts "poop" in place of "Oh."
Of course, this got me thinking (something I should have done before I shared that post). Who did invent AC?
David Sparshott of WIRED Magazine deems AC as the "overlooked underwriter of our era of mobile prolixity." Whatever, Dave. Anyway, the article goes into incredible detail about the making and history of the infamous correction system that we all love to hate. He credits the onset of touch-screen typing as the catalyst for AC development. As Sparshott claims, AC is a remedy for "the gap between whim and word [being] narrower than it's ever been, and our world [being] awash in easily rendered thought."
Though pinning down a single creator (which is exactly what I want to do, pin him down, like with staples or something equivalent) is difficult. However, the person largely credited with AC is Dean Hachamovitchat of Microsoft headquarters in Washington. Try typing his last name on your smartphone. You'll get "Ha hammock."
What does that even mean?
When Hachamovitchat joined forces with Microsoft, he engendered himself to the camp called the Functionality Gang. It became his mission to help people everywhere accomplish "a little bit of creativity and a whole lot of scutwork." His words, not mine. Scutwork. He then built upon the auto-expand glossary already established by Charles Simonyi, known as the Father of Graphical Word Processing. I'm going to refer to him as Charley F3 and blame him, too.
As AC grew and morphed into the monster we know today, it became glaringly obvious that the system not only enforced primary spellings, but it also created what WIRED calls an "editorial consciousness."
By 2000, Europeans referred to the censorial function of AC as the Cupertino Effect. Try using that word in a text. Yeah, frustrating isn't it? Because AC recognizes that word immediately. But it can't tell the difference between shark and shake or violin and colon.
Like my hubby says: stupid autocorrect.