Fairly frequently one of my Facebook friends (not always the same one) posts a link to some “autocorrect humor” website, usually accompanied by a note that suggests that the person thought this was the funniest thing they’ve seen in ages. Every reply is some variation of “LOL! Laughed my ass off!” or some similar exclamation of extreme hilarity.
Now, don’t get me wrong–I like a clever autocorrect as much as the next person…if it’s actually plausible. But almost none of these are. It’s so obvious that somebody just made something up trying to look clever, and I can’t figure out why nobody else gets it. My friends are not idiots, either–most of the ones who post these are among the smarter on my list, overall.
Here’s an example of the latest crop. Every last one of them looks fake. So I ask you: what’s so funny? Does everybody know these are fake and they’re just laughing at the clever ways the creator can simulate autocorrect mishaps? Or do this many otherwise smart people actually believe that autocorrect would make these changes?
So someone’s trying to text “basement” (and we’ll let lie the implausibility of using this method of communication to broach the subject of smelly basements) and it comes out “ballsack?” First, what kind of misspelling of “basement” gets even close to “ballsack?” Second, what kind of autocorrect program is going to have “ballsack” in its dictionary? Strikes me as ridiculously fake in several aspects, and I agree that it’s not funny. The humor, such as it is, fails to even reach Beavis and Butthead level.
None of them do to me. I find it impossible to believe that a commercial product (especially one by Apple, who won’t even allow porn apps to be sold in its app store) would correct, for example, “basement” to “ballsack.” Any so-called ‘autocorrect’ that takes a perfectly legitimate non-obscene word and corrects it to an obscene word automatically fails my reality checker. I know people love to snicker like 9-year-olds over ‘dirty words,’ but come on. This is just ludicrous.
Now, again, if the whole point of the thing is to make clever made-up autocorrects…well, I still don’t think too many of them are funny but I can snicker along with some (I like a clever dirty joke too!) I think what annoys me about the most is that people try to insist that they’re real. Five minutes with an iPhone will prove they’re not.
Just the other day my brother texted me about going to visit my grandma.
He typed out, “Lets go visit grandma she seems lonley.”
His stupid phone autocorrected it to, “Lets go visit grandma she seems like the sort of slut who fuck two dudes at once and she’s such a nasty bitch she’d probably do her own grandsons that fucking whore of a cunt.”
They’re plausible. This is autocorrect, not spellcheck, after all. I just swyped several of the meant words and swype either put a wrong word or at least suggested the wrong word on most. I never got tourette’s for roulette, but I typed it three times and got: 1) doubletree 2) roulette (with toilette and epiphyte as the first two suggested words) 3) toilet.
I’ve had a couple of autocorrect instances where I texted a response without proofing it and a message with a totally different meaning was sent (most often: ‘dirty’ being sent instead of ‘sorry’)
You do know you can customize the dictionary, right? My phone didn’t recognize dipshit the first time I used it in a text and asked if I wanted to add it. I said yes, of course, so now it will put dipshit when I swype it, and occasionally when I swype something close.
As far as discussing basement issues via text (different poster, too lazy to quote)? I discuss issues of similar importance via text all the time.
Well, I have an Android phone with swype, and it does shit like this to me all the time. Very rarely does it work out to be a funny sentence (usually it’s just nonsense) but it has happened. And my dictionary is FULL of dirty words; as soon as I got the phone I added every filthy phrase I could imagine. Ballsack for basement? I can totally see that.
I dunno, YMMV, and maybe an iPhone is different. Whatever. But, this happens to me a lot, so it seems pretty plausible.
I don’t care, fake or not, they always make me laugh. Want me to tell you a real one, though?
So my SO and I were talking about marmite. We are equally divided in this house; he loves it and I hate it. So I was mocking him about marmite and I e-mailed him, “Next thing I know you’re going to put it on everything! It’s like an infestation!”
He e-mails me back, saying “I am not infested with marmots!”
Marmots??? I write back “What do marmots have to do with it?”
Indeed, his phone had auto-corrected marmite to marmots! We still laugh over it and I still ask him if he is infested with marmots.
As others already said, it’s entirely plausible. If autocorrect is on, the first time you try to write ‘ballsack’ (for ecample in an email to a workmate), the phone will try to change it to ‘ballast’ or ‘ballpark’ or some such - and in telling it that ‘ballsack’ really was your intent, you add that word to the custom dictionary. From that point on, ‘ballsack’ becomes a valid word- and if you badly mistype ‘basement’, the autocorrect algorithm might well correct it to ‘ballsack’
Sure, but look at some of the entries – people were typing words that they didn’t know were words. Why would “cameltoe” be in the dictionary of someone who didn’t know what that is?
Well some are a little implausible but they are pretty funny. I loved the police officer on the unicorn! (Although I just tried it on my phone; I typed unicorm and it autocorrected to “uniform.” Damn.)
