Auto(in)correct
By BEN ZIMMER January 13, 2011
Pity poor Hannah, who received a startling text message on her cellphone, sent from her father: "Your mom and I are going to divorce next month."
After Hannah registered her alarm, her father quickly texted back: "I wrote 'Disney,' and this phone changed it. We are going to Disney."
Welcome to the world of smartphone autocorrection, where incautious typing can lead to hilarious and sometimes shocking results. With the rapid success of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones, more and more people are discovering the pitfalls of tapping on a virtual keyboard. Just as the spell-check feature in a word-processing program tries to save you from your own sloppy typing, either by politely suggesting alternatives or by automatically replacing egregious errors, the latest mobile devices are supposed to take care of your typos - but often fail with comic results.
Back in June, The Times's technology columnist, David Pogue, blogged about some "autocorrect follies" sent to him by his readers, full of howlers like "Sorry about your feces" when "Sorry about your fever" was intended. Pogue sagely advised, "Especially when your boss, your parents or your love interest is the recipient of your e-mail or text message, it's worth taking an extra moment to proofread."
These vast new opportunities for social embarrassment are now being charted by the Web site Damn You Auto Correct! (D.Y.A.C. for short), where victims of autocorrect are invited to submit screen grabs of their most inglorious gaffes. Though D.Y.A.C. wasn't the first to exploit this concept (a Tumblr feed with an unprintable twist on "iPhone" came first), it has quickly become an online sensation. Within days after Jillian Madison, co-founder of the Pophangover Network, set up the site in late October, D.Y.A.C. started getting a million daily page views, with hundreds of submissions every day. And now Madison has parlayed that success into a D.Y.A.C. book, due out in March.
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