Staying Fit
It’s not all that often that you read something tweeted by a reality TV star and find yourself nodding vigorously in agreement. But that’s what happened to millions of people a few weeks back when a certain social media celebrity took to Twitter to voice her frustrations with the whims of the autocorrect feature. More specifically, the celebrity issued a fervent plea for all social media and text messaging services to offer an edit function so autocorrect-inflicted errors, from embarrassing misspellings to confusing typos, could be fixed without deleting and reposting a message.
Currently, Facebook does give its users the power to edit their posts, but Twitter doesn’t. And Apple’s Messages service doesn’t either, though there are rumors that it's developing a new tool to combat autocorrect errors. Right now, autocorrect can be a problem for celebrities and non-celebs alike, an in-theory useful tool that, seemingly more often than not, mucks up its job and leads to unnecessary confusion. Its incompetence is legendarily documented at the website damnyouautocorrect.com, a popular repository for flummoxed texters who take a screenshot of their autocorrect mistakes and post for all eternity.
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So, in support of this important campaign, we offer nine commonly autocorrected words that drive us, well, ducking nuts:
- “dear” autocorrects to “dead” — A Dear John letter is never welcome, but we could all agree that it’s preferable to a Dead John letter. Its morbid corollary is the for/die switcheroo, which happens when autocorrect — all too frequently — inexplicably suggests that “for” should be “die.”
- “honey” to “hiney” — The most bizarre autocorrect fails are the most inexplicable ones, like this one, which changes “honey” into something that isn’t even a word. Example: “If you’re still at the store, can you grab some hiney?”
- “my” to “me” — This one makes you sound like a wee Leprechaun. Example: “Thanks for coming to me party.”
- “of” to “if” — This may be the single most common autocorrect mistake. It’s harmless, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
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