Autoreplace
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Today's Questionable Content:
What auto-replace — in a messaging app or your mind — do you need to turn off or turn on?
August 12, 2015 @ 7:53 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
« previous post | next post »
Today's Questionable Content:
What auto-replace — in a messaging app or your mind — do you need to turn off or turn on?
August 12, 2015 @ 7:53 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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John Baker said,
August 12, 2015 @ 9:20 am
While auto-replace can be turned off or on, it's more likely that Dora was so angry at her brother that she created a specific entry in her auto-replace dictionary: bro –> asshole. This is, of course, a terrible idea, since it means that broom –> assholeom, broken –> assholeken, and so forth, but maybe she did it shortly before this conversation and is not yet fully aware of its disadvantages.
Mara K said,
August 12, 2015 @ 10:54 am
Not necessarily, John–her auto-replaced is likely triggered by the use of a space or punctuation mark. So "bro ", "bro, " and "bro." will be replaced by "asshole ", "asshole,", and "asshole.", but "broom" will not become "assholeom."
Incidentally, as a fan of the comic, I can tell you that Dora's brother Sven really is an asshole, of the type that we all wanted to date in high school and who has not yet come off that high of being wanted so badly that he can manipulate all of us, and he has caused some of Dora's friends great emotional pain as a result. In the last couple weeks of the comic, he has begun to show remorse for his behavior, and we don't yet know if it's genuine, but Dora's friends have convinced her that reconciliation is worth it.
richardelguru said,
August 12, 2015 @ 1:17 pm
Or something like this famous replacement-boo-boo:
Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.
elika said,
August 12, 2015 @ 3:23 pm
in grad school once I had a data file where I wanted to replace all the instances of 'NA' in a file with something, maybe '0' or '.' Took me a lot of poking around to realize that one of the items I was testing, 'banana', has 2 instances of NA in it, and I'd foolishly replaced every time that stimulus appeared in the file with something silly like ba00.
Pflaumbaum said,
August 12, 2015 @ 3:43 pm
I win this, surely – because I've actually managed to do it in a Language Log comment.
Last year I attempted to write mm-hmm, but instead produced Malinki-hmm, substituting a pet-name for my 2-year-old daughter… and thus displaying here – of all places – both poor IT skills and ignorance of gender inflection in Russian adjectives.
Rubrick said,
August 12, 2015 @ 4:43 pm
Obligatory link to a wonderful account of the famous "wizard-for-mage" autoreplace disaster at TSR in the '90s. (Get it while LiveJournal still exists…)
[(myl) Against the day that LiveJournal goes the way of all bits:
]
bratschegirl said,
August 12, 2015 @ 8:11 pm
One of my favorite "corrections" of all time was allegedly printed in the Boston Globe, acknowledging that in the previous day's story about the state budget, the line that read "back in the African-American" should in fact have read "back in the black."
Eric said,
August 14, 2015 @ 3:03 pm
Since the out-of-the-box dictionary Swype dictionary is too prudish to contain any potentially offensive words, I generally just add them as they come up. I've made an exception in allowing it to continue interpreting "fuck" ("fucking", "fucked", etc) as "duck" ("ducking", "ducked",…). I almost always find it to be an improvement on what I intended to type.
Stuart Orford said,
August 26, 2015 @ 2:36 am
@bratschegirl: The alt.folklore.urban archive had a page on this (Internet Archive):
The Fresno Bee does not have any list of excluded terminology. And they use no program that automatically converts old phrases into new ones. The substitution of "African-American" in place of "black" was a deliberate premeditated manual replacement. After the column ran in 1990, the editorial management (knowing this) was furious, and tried to track down the journalist responsible. No one would own up. The staff assigned to the column adamantly denied any involvement.