The moment my phone auto-corrected 'meeting' to 'meating' in a work email to my boss was when I finally turned that stupid feature off after 7 years.

Been using touchscreen keyboards since 2016 and never bothered to disable auto-correct until that exact email last Tuesday, now I just type slower and hit the right letters myself - has anyone else had a single embarrassing moment make them ditch a setting they'd been putting up with forever?

4 comments

4 Comments

the_brian21d ago

Oh man, I just read something about this the other day actually. There was this linguistics researcher who said autocorrect basically programs us to doubt our own typing skills over time. Like after 7 years your brain just expects the phone to fix things and you stop paying attention. I had a similar thing happen with swipe typing where it turned "I'll be there soon" into "I'll be there spoon" and I just stared at my phone for 5 seconds before sending it to my mom. Something about that one embarrassing moment finally breaks the spell.

ben_lewis21d agoMost Upvoted

Bullshit. Autocorrect didn't make me doubt my typing, my fat thumbs did that all on their own. People have been making typos since the first typewriter. Blaming autocorrect for your own sloppy typing is just passing the buck. If you're staring at "spoon" for five seconds and almost sending it, you weren't paying attention in the first place. The phone isn't rewiring your brain, you're just getting lazy and expecting it to bail you out. Turn the damn thing off if it's causing that much confusion.

robert65921d ago

Did you catch that moment where you just stared at "spoon" and almost sent it anyway? I've done the same thing with "duck" when I meant "ducking" and my brain just accepted it for a split second. Makes me wonder if our brains are actually rewiring to trust the phone more than our own fingers. Has anyone studied what happens in that weird half-second before you realize the mistake?

ward.kim21d ago

My buddy Chris actually had this happen with swipe texting (and @the_brian, you mentioning swipe typing made me think of it). He was trying to type "home" to his wife about coming back from a trip and it came out as "hooker" instead. He stared at his phone for a solid 10 seconds before realizing what almost happened, then turned off swipe typing right then and never looked back. The guy literally went back to two-thumb pecking like it was 2012 just to avoid that one near-miss. Something about seeing that word in the suggestion bar just breaks your trust completely.