it’s a blessing and a curse:
…auto-correct.
one thing i’ve noticed as i go through the old bits that i do for flashback and throwbacks week to week is that my spelling isn’t great. it’s not as bad as it looks – most of the time if i read back i catch things. i KNOW that’s not how you spell certain words. and i have no issue with that red squiggle line popping up like some corrected sixth grade essay to remind me there’s no “u” in “forty” (i always spelled it “fourty”, and now we have the red line i’ll see and you won’t). i’d leave off the second “r” in “surprised” instead typing “suprised” since we don’t actually enunciate that when we say it in america.
and don’t even get me started on the two words i still, to this day, have to say phonetically in my head to spell properly, “guarantee” and “restaurant”.
but what’s odd to me is auto correct. (which, according to spell check, is not all one word in windows but IS on your phone, since i’ve typed “fucking autocorrect” countless times as follow ups to texts that logically made no sense thanks to my phone stepping in and “correcting” me. if you’re looking for easy entertainment you can just google “autocorrect fails” (where my browser sees it all as one word for some reason).
but the actual algorithm behind it baffles me.
for example, when trying to type “saniderm” to a co-worker (it’s a medical wrap now used my many tattoo artists as a post work bandage, but my skin doesn’t deal well with adhesive so i won’t let it be used on me) it corrected it to the name “Saunders”. when i was trying to describe a bruise i got from budnik i jokingly tried to call it “leprosy” but because i typed “leprocy” (one letter off) it didn’t know what to correct it to and had zero suggestions. meanwhile, it can identify “qgsr” as “what”, presumably because all you did was hit keys that were only one over on the keyboard? i guess that makes it common? but if i type one letter off it’s confused?
i’ll never understand it. but fuck it, i don’t program it, so not the end of the world, i suppose. and i’m pretty sure i can just turn the shit off if i really want to.