by CIDU Bill

[OT] This is why I don’t use AutoCorrect

Somebody in my town posted that all the trick-or-treaters were very polite, “even the little Muslims.”
She got a lot of very angry responses before she realized what had happened and posted a follow-up: “I’d typed MUNCHKINS!”
Auto-correct is evil. I swear, someday WW3 will begin because Autocorrect changes a word in a high-level communiqué.

21 Comments

  8. Unknown's avatar

    Ha…I’ve always thought it would be a misunderstanding through Google Translate that would start a war.

    :-)

  9. Unknown's avatar

    I think this is bogus unless she is a really, really bad speller. I tried several different apps and software and all of them accepted Munchkin as a legitimate word. My text message on my phone even suggested Munchkin when I only typed “Munc” so it’s hard to see how it would come up with Muslim unless she typed “Mus” to begin with and that does seem likely.

  10. Unknown's avatar

    I think this is bogus unless she is a really, really bad speller. I tried several different apps and software and all of them accepted Munchkin as a legitimate word. My text message on my phone even suggested Munchkin when I only typed “Munc” so it’s hard to see how it would come up with Muslim unless she typed “Mus” to begin with and that doesn’t seem likely.

  11. Unknown's avatar

    Oh, she was quite genuinely mortified. Especially since this was a local page, so she was interacting with people he actually knew.

    Never underestimate the randomness of AutoCorrect: a friend of mine once sent me a text in which the word “AutoCorrect” — AUTOCORRECT of all words! — got changed to auto-da-fé.

    Seriously.

    I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been the recipient.

    And she didn’t even know what the word meant.

    Disclaimer: I’m not sure I would have known the word either if not for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip9x-HlBsZY

  12. Unknown's avatar

    Hubby talks rather than types . . . you can imagine what comes out (of the email, not his mouth; in fact, they’re often not the same at all).

  13. Unknown's avatar

    Seriously, though, Grawlix, I could see it as not an Autocorrect or Google Translate issue, but a cultural misunderstanding: “How could we know that ‘This is a beautiful morning’ is, in their country, an idiom meaning ‘Your mother has enthusiastic sex with many goats’?”

  14. Unknown's avatar

    “all of them accepted Munchkin as a legitimate word.”

    When spelled correctly. But does it correctly detect all the misspellings of “Munchkin” as attempts to spell “Munchkin”, or does it try to correct them to something else? (Note: The capitalization probably makes a huge difference.)

  15. Unknown's avatar

    Well, we survived the translations “I am a jelly doughnut” and “I carnally desire the Polish people.”

  16. Unknown's avatar

    Somebody just posted this on Facebook: “It helps if you think of Autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying so hard to be helpful but is in fact quite drunk.”

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