You Can Turn Off Auto-Correct On Your Phone, It's Fine
Like most folks, I'm in a group chat with friends. (They're all just out of frame, laughing too.) We send posts to each other. We derive amusement and strengthen our friend group by responding to those posts in the affirmative. Someone chats something, everyone likes the message or says "lol" and so on. You get the idea.
A few weeks ago, one of my friends sent this compelling video of a man successfully smoking from a bong affixed atop a flying drone to the group chat. He is simultaneously controlling the drone and smoking weed at the same time. It's incredible stuff. (Apparently this is this guy's thing.) "That's so fucken (sic) tight," I responded. Except, this is not what my phone did.
Instead, my phone changed "tight" to "right." "That's so fucken (sic) right," my phone sent. I had to immediately follow-up with "*tight." Which, I think you'll agree, makes a decidedly chill statement very much not chill. I was devastated. How could autocorrect betray me like this?
No doubt you have experienced some form of this tragedy. The autocorrect-gone-wrong genre of jokes is close to a decade old now. The one thing that binds us is that we have all accidentally texted "ducking" instead of "fucking" at some point in our lives.
The answer to why this happens has been long demystified. As you type out whatever is you're trying to say on your phone, the software looks at the words you've used, checks them against a dictionary, and then tries to predict what word you might want to use next. As you type more into your phone the software learns the words you use and adds them to the dictionary.
In my case, because I rarely say "that's so fucken tight," my phone saw the final word in that statement and, seemingly accustomed to my meek, adulating nature, changed it to "right" — shattering my guise of group chat chill and subtly outing me as someone who never really says "tight" as a synonym for "cool."
This isn't the first time this has happened either. Over the past few months, maybe even years, I've been fighting autocorrect over small bits of slang, acronyms, places, names, and even brands. Sure it's nice to just kinda smash away at the keyboard and let the machines tidy everything up, but there is nothing more tedious than having autocorrect jump in a change a word you did not want to be changed — like a parent who is really invested in your life but struggles to keep up with the times. No dad, "FortNITE" not "forthright."
So, in a brief moment of anger and frustration I went into the settings of my phone and turned off the "Auto-Correction" setting in iOS. (I have already turned off the "Auto-Capitalization" setting because I am cool.) Sure, this would free me from having to fight the machines to express myself, but would I, on balance, be rendered into a babbling mess of typos at worst, or at best a slow, methodical typer, outgunned by my computer-assisted peers?
As of today, I am one month autocorrect free, and I am happy to report that I have never felt better. As it turns out, if you disable autocorrect on iOS, it will still highlight things that are misspelled. It's like… typing on a computer. I know that this sound obvious, but literally within minutes of turning off autocorrect, I realized that anything misspelled could be easily corrected with two taps of my thumb.
Sure, I can't just mash away and expect the computer to tidy up after me, and not having autocorrect to fall back on means that I need to pay slightly more attention as I type. But it hasn't turned me into a squinting, inscrutable luddite who has to hunt and peck to transmit the simplest of messages.
Instead, having to make sure that every keystroke is true has just made my consider my words in ways that having an always-on correction algorithm would never allow. It's hasn't entirely changed my voice in group chats or texts or posts online, but just forced me to be a little more concise with my words. The difference is literally between my autocorrect self saying "oh wow that's amazing and incredible" and my post-autocorrect self settling for "that's amazing."
What's more, not having autocorrect has made me realize that the machines have made my thumbs weak and imprecise. Mechanically speaking, there's something more satisfying about typing out a simple text perfectly on the first run than just letting the algorithm sort it all out. That you've somehow mastered the imperfect design of a small keyboard displayed on a screen. A person shouldn't have to precisely pad away at a thin slab of glass to communicate, but through the plasticity of the human mind and motor skills, we've figured it out anyway. Again, it's not a crazy magical change, but I am slightly proud of myself that I'm getting better at consistently typing out "you" and not "yuo."
All told, turning off autocorrect feels more like driving a manual transmission car rather than riding a brakeless fixed gear bicycle in the city. Like cooking with fresh herbs versus dried, pre-packaged ones. Like brewing your own coffee as opposed to spending $3 for a small drip down at the cafe. Like folding your own laundry over picking it up. You're wrong if you think it makes you superior, but it adds a welcome wrinkle to your life that's enjoyable to overcome. It's nice to have those. They're so fucken tight.
