Hurtling as I am towards grumpy old mandom, I’ve only recently got the hang of text messaging – T9 predictive text in particular. It took me a little while to grasp the concept at all, but now I understand how it works (and I do think it’s bloody clever) I’m still a bit mystified by some of the assumptions made by the people who compiled the dictionary on my phone. (It’s a Nokia 2310, only £19 and surprisingly waterproof).
For example ‘an’ gets priority over ‘am’. Why? Didn’t they look at some sample text messages? Surely most of them consisted of something like ‘am on the train’ or ‘am on the way home’ or ‘am on a window ledge on the 13th floor’ – maybe I’m being egotistical, but isn’t ‘am’ more useful than ‘an’ as a first choice word?
It annoys me that ‘he’ gets priority over ‘if’ but I suppose that’s understandable – the champion texters on my train are all female and they probably have more cause to use the word ‘he’ than I do. My life by comparison must be a whirl of uncertainty if (there we go again) I need to type ‘if’ so much.
Sometimes there are nice coincidences. Try to type ‘kiss’ and you get ‘lips’, for example. Did they notice that somewhere in T9 or Nokia HQ? I like to think a poetical dictionary compiler did.
I had to send a message the other day explaining that I’d made a particularly difficult phone call. I tried to type ‘I have phoned…’ and it came out as ‘I have sinned…’
Yes, well, thank you and good night, Nuance Communications, your irony department has earnt their bonus this year.