Nowadays every time I need a laugh, I fall back on autocorrect optionsALL OF US have encountered this slightly irritating person at some point in our lives. Someone who claims to know the words in our mind better than we do so that when we begin speaking, he will prompt the next word, all this in the tone of a friendly conversationalist. There is even a genre of jokes about this category of people. The ones that annoy me most are about husbands half-answering questions meant for their wives. I find it insulting to the wife’s purported lack of intelligence of course, but I am also equally outraged by the portrayal of the husband figure who comes across as a traffic policeman giving directions before the change of signal.
Our phones—and our computers— now have this annoying beast trapped inside them. I do not know what gender to ascribe to this meddlesome person—Mr Autocorrect or Ms Autocorrect. How old is this person, I ask myself, and my answer usually varies between extremes, a brat and an intrusive old aunt. What exactly does Autocorrect do? It would be too simplistic to say that Autocorrect mind-reads. What it actually does is that it finger-reads, the way a person who has problems with hearing might lip-read. Well, if that isn’t irritating, why is Autocorrect so disliked? The primary reason behind that could be that Autocorrect behaves like a shrink who knows you better than you know yourself. It’s like your father telling you that you will never be happy with the person you’ve decided to marry because he knows you better than you do.
My introduction to the world of autocorrect was about a decade ago when it lived as the T9 dictionary option on my inexpensive cell phone. A Luddite for all purposes, I did not know about the existence of this resident genie. Every time I would type a text message to my mother in Bangla, the words would take on new lives. I would scold my fingers and retype. The results were hilarious: my poor mother would call me back with two questions – had she gone so old that she could not make sense of the English sentences that her daughter wrote to her? Her second response was confessional: perhaps English Literature graduates used a discourse that was unintelligible to most? Soon enough there were noises circulating in the family, all until my cousin turned off the T9 option.
Nearly half a decade of my Facebook life has made me a veteran collector of autocorrect malapropisms. A few days ago, harassed by the autocorrect option on my iPad, I put up this status update: Sometimes autocorrect can be a shrink. Like when it changes “pyar” to “pharmacy”. I had been trying to write down a stanza from an old song that had got lost from my memory, and suddenly, having caught it on a neighbour’s radio, I wanted to note it down. But autocorrect wasn’t in the mood for love. It wouldn’t let me write pyar, and corrected it to “pharmacy”. Where else could I vent my disgust except on Facebook? Soon my friends were lodging their own complaints. Bari turns to bride, complained a Bengali friend, angry at this metamorphosis of the house to the bride, but that was not all. Tomar bari was being changed into Tom Brown. That was grossly unfair, it was true, “your house” turning to “Tom Brown”. For another, “Gurgaon” had been changed to “purgation”, an error that gave many much pleasure, given the number of likes the comment received. And, of course, given the number of poets on my friends list, there were numerous comments about love, illness, pharmacy and the cure. The websitefunnpickens.com lists 25 hilarious autocorrect failures, but it’s the playing out of autocorrect when used in the Indian languages that yields the richest harvest of I-didn’t-mean-that-of-course. Having clapped from the fences for a few years now, I notice that autocorrect becomes censorious when it comes to PDA (Public Display of Affection). It is not only “pyar” that changes to “pharmacy”, but “muuah” is sobered down to “mutual ah”.
Nowadays every time I need a laugh, I fall back on autocorrect options. A few months ago, a friend faced this: ‘Every time I type hahaha, autocorrect changes it to bananas’. Comments about going bananas and banana republic were inevitable. The other time, the poet Divya Rajan complained about the difficulty of wishing her online friends on the occasion of Onam: ‘Not a political statement of any kind. Whenever I type Happy Onam, my autocorrect changes it to Obama’. I couldn’t decide which was better, that or my friend Priyadarshini’s problem— ‘Every time I type my name, autocorrect changes it into Oriya’; or my colleague Puneeta’s, who has had her name changed to “puberty”. The writer Sampurna Chattarji has had her name changed to “Samurai”. If you thought it couldn’t get worse, read this Facebook post by Pranaadhika Sinha Devburman: ‘... my surname is spelt “Devburman” and not “Doberman”. As much as I love you *repeats chin tickle*, I refuse to change that’. When I narrate this to my husband, he repeats his old complaint with a sigh—his surname is “Ghosh”, one that autocorrect changes to “ghost”. The best story about autocorrect changing names comes from the publisher Karthika VK. “Every time I write Ravi, autocorrect changes it to David”. Reading that in the context of Indian English publishing, with its back story about the publishers Ravi Singh and David Davidar, autocorrect takes on a new prescient role.
A few days ago, I made a note about Bimal-da, our carpenter, on my iPad. An amateur singer of kirtans, a raconteur of the best kind, a moralist always on the verge of calibration, a spiritual wanderer, Bimal-da is one of the most interesting people I have met. It is another matter that most people call him ‘mad’, a fact that he is acutely aware of. I was noting down a devotional Bimal-da had been singing. When I typed his name ‘Bimal’ on my iPad, autocorrect changed it to ‘normal’. I wanted to tell him that—he would have laughed, this joke returning on him, every time he said ‘I’m not normal because everyone else is’. I ignored autocorrect and typed his name again. ‘Bimal’. This time autocorrect changed it to ‘nomad’. When I paraphrased that for Bimal-da, he left immediately. Turning back near the door to speak to me, he said, ‘It’s a prophecy. It’s true. I cannot be at one place for a long time’. Autocorrect, also known as “Cupertino error” after the city where Apple has its headquarters, had got that right.