For years I fought against having a cell phone. I'm not sure exactly why I resisted for so long. I assume that it was a combination of not having the money for one, hating when people ignored me to take calls and generally not having a very large desire to talk to people. While I was one of the last of my generation to finally get a phone it did not take long for me to become completely addicted to it. I'm not sure what to do with myself if I'm not checking the damn thing every 5 minutes. Thinking back on my phoneless years I'm not sure how I didn't want to blow my brains out every time I took the bus. I did read a lot more books back then now that I think on it, maybe I should be phoneless once again? I digress, as I always do. The point is that eventually I bit the bullet and bought an iPhone. Now, I didn't buy a fancy new one and wait in line for a couple of days like a hipster douche nozzle. In fact, I didn't really buy one at all. I used a free upgrade to get a 3gs and other than ATT raping me by lying about how my rates would need to be changed it has been a pleasant year or so. Although I wouldn't be me if I wasn't enraged about something and that's where autocorrect comes in.
I understand autocorrect. It's incredibly helpful when my phone tells me that I have misspelled "vomitose" in a text message sent to my parents at 2:47 am on a Wednesday. I even appreciate how if you use a word often enough it will learn it despite the fact that it is not an actual word, Mexcellent has been added to my phone's vocabulary. It actually is quite impressive that my phone even has the ability to check my spelling let alone learn new words. So I don't think it would be that far out of line for my phone to learn it's role and understand that much of my standard vocabulary tends to be a little blue. (Here's the part in the blog where you should probably hide the kids)
My goddamn phone tries to edit out every single time I swear. The most infuriating of them all is that every time I type "hell" (probably about once in every 28 words) it changes it to "he'll." Do you know how many times I've actually intended to say "he'll?" NEVER. When I'm ranting about the ineptitude of the Bears offensive line I can't have Jonny K thinking I said, "Mike Martz should burn in the fiery depths of he'll for eternity!" First of all my statement now makes zero sense. On top of that it has lost all of it's oomph. Swears are used to give a possibly mundane statement a little extra zip. Nothing takes that away more than what appears to be an idiotic typo. THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF AUTOCORRECT IS TO FIX TYPOS, NOT CREATE THEM! I told someone to "shut the funk up" via text this week and I'm pretty sure with it I lost what little street cred I had. That makes me look like the sort of higher than thou asshole who makes a big fucking production out of his ability to avoid swearing. Or even worse, it makes me look like a parent trying to curb his swearing so his kid avoids detention.
Here's the thing, I like to swear. I like the versatility of words like fuck. It's a noun, a proper noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb. It's basically a sentence diagrammer's wet dream. I enjoy making up creative swears such as cock gobbler and spoogemaster. While I appreciate that my phone is trying to be helpful I don't want those to be changed to clock goblin and sponge master. How difficult would it be to add 10-15 more colorful words into the autocorrect? Or at the very least let my phone eventually learn that I am a foul mouthed son of a bitch so that it adapts. If it could do that I promise I won't even complain when I text someone that "hell be here in a few minutes."
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