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!’ ”
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Two years ago my wife and I went to Orchid Island off Taitung for a few days vacation. We were shocked to realize that for what it cost us, we could have done a bike vacation in Borneo for a week or two, or taken another trip to the Philippines. Indeed, most of the places we could have gone for that vacation in neighboring countries offer a much better experience than Taiwan at a much lower price. Hence, the recent news showing that tourist visits to Pingtung County’s Kenting, long in decline, reached a 27 year low this summer came
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth — Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example — women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples
RSS