There were a few things that were sweetly grandmotherly about Patricia Duncan Moran’s Facebook post to her great-granddaughter Devyn on her birthday. For starters, Moran had posted it to her own wall instead of Devyn’s. She named but did not tag her great-granddaughter. But most striking was the signer.
“Happy birthday to my beautiful great-granddaughter,” the message read. “See you soon. Love, Great Grandmaster Flash.”
Great Grandmaster Flash?
Photo: Bloomberg
It was the PG version of what’s come to be known as the autofail, the accidental (and sometimes mortifying) autocorrection from which many a blog and book have been spawned. In this case, Facebook’s autocomplete feature had made the assumption that “Grandma” was short for “Grandmaster” and adjusted accordingly, tagging the hip-hop pioneer in the process.
And it wasn’t just Moran who had fallen victim: Grandmothers all over the Internet were tagging the Grandmaster, their messages so numerous, they became the subject of a blog, Love, Grampa and Grandmaster Flash.
“It became quite the family joke,” Moran, 83, said by phone from Montreal. “I kept saying, ‘Who is that?’ because I had never heard of Grandmaster Flash. But now everybody calls me Great Grandma Flash.”
Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors.
TECHNOLOGICAL CONVENIENCE, KINDA
It’s not simply that a town called “Cupertino” (the home of Apple) may appear when you are trying to encourage “cooperation,” as was an early default of Microsoft Word. Nor is it that “prosciutto” may yield an unwanted “prostitute” sandwich. Nope, today’s autocorrects feel almost ... personal.
There was the time I was concerned about a friend’s dog (“How’s the pet?”) but ended up asking about my former boyfriend, “Pete.” (My iPhone remembered, whereas I wanted to forget.) There was the friend, a cocktail lover, who texted her pediatrician to ask if she should switch her 2-year-old from “1 percent milk to whiskey” — er, whole milk. (He said yes, definitely, she should.) And Allyson Downey, a New York entrepreneur whose frequent response to something she liked (“Love ‘em!”) always seemed to read “Love me.”
“It makes me look horribly needy,” Downey said.
And then there was Naomi Campbell, who sent a tweet to 300,000 followers congratulating “Malaria” (that is, Malala) on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. (Campbell works with a number of public health charities, so it wasn’t inconceivable that she had written the word “malaria” many times before.)
MUST-USE FEATURE
Autocorrect originated with word processing programs of the 1980s, in which the language used was checked against a dictionary to make sure the spelling was correct. (According to a 2012 study in Britain, two-thirds of adults would not be able to spell “necessary” and one-third “definitely” without the help of the feature.)
But these days autocorrect is creating problems as it solves others. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists — or “natural language programmers,” as they are known — to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. And they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the “fat finger” phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you’ve talked about.
Apple’s iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium — that is, “the casual style” you may use in texting versus “the more formal language” you are likely to use in e-mail, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss.
Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, sentence structure and tone.
All of which is fine, except that it turns the notion of the guiltless autocorrect on its head. These days, autocorrections are likely to tell the person on the receiving end something about you.
“A lot of the time, you can’t even replicate it because it’s so personalized,” said Ben Zimmer, chairman of the new-words committee at the American Dialect Society, which is devoted to the study of the English language.
It did not start out that way. As the creator of Microsoft’s autocorrect feature told Wired, in the early days of Word — before a profanity “blacklist” was created — executives at Goldman Sachs were angry that the program changed the company’s name to Goddamn Sachs. Similarly, in 2007 most systems did not yet contain the name of an up-and-coming Illinois senator (now President Barack Obama) but did store that of an international terrorist (Osama bin Laden), resulting in an unfortunate correction.
More recently, Google was criticized when a Web search for “English major who taught herself calculus” suggested changing “herself” to “himself.”
Johan Schalkwyk, an engineer who leads speech efforts at Google, said, “Keeping up with slang and trending acronyms is like a jungle” — a jungle full of cultural land mines.
But the more we fail, the more understanding we have about those fails — or at least we hope so.
“You have to be careful, and I learned that lesson,” said Moran, who has nearly 40 grandchildren and great-grandchildren in all. “My family still says when they see me, ‘Here comes Flash!’ ”
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