Jillian Madison - Damn You, Autocorrect!: Awesomely Embarrassing Text Messages You Didnt Mean to Send

To Mom & Dad. Thank you for not owning smartphones, and for only mildly freaking out when I shunned corporate life to work on the internets. To Michelle. Get ready, because tonight, were goin TOMCAT. To Brie. My best friend, and the most amazing woodchuck you will ever meet.

I meant woman! Damn you, Autocorrect! And to everyone who contributed to the website and this book. Thank you for not proofreading before hitting send. Text on, motherduckers! Contents DAMN YOU, AUTOCORRECT! If you own a smartphone, theres a good chance youve screamed that phrase at least once. Maybe you sent a text to your spouse that you fd the dog (fed) or fired off a note to a co-worker about your bad case of the manboobs (Mondays). Either way, Autocorrect was likely the culprit. While the feature on our mobile devices can be a blessing, its also often a curse.

It frequently changes words without rhyme or reason, and if you hit send too quickly, it can lead to some funny, confusing, or just plain embarrassing results. I found that out the hard way in the summer of 2010 when I innocently tried to invite a few friends over for an evening of gelato. My iPhones Autocorrect, however, had another idea and asked them over for a night of fellatio. And just like that, Autocorrect turned me into a hussy. What would my mother say! Shortly after the gelato/fellatio incident, I started wondering if other people out there were having similar experiences with their smartphones. So I purchased the www.damnyouautocorrect.com domain, set up the site on a whim, and added about fifteen Autocorrect incidents involving myself and my friends.

I could never have anticipated the publics reaction. As it turned out, there were millions of people who were just as frustrated by Autocorrect as I was. By the end of its first week online, DamnYouAutoCorrect.com earned write-ups on ABC, CNN, Gizmodo, Mashable, The Huffington Post , and in dozens of other national media outlets. It went viral on Twitter and Facebook and, literally overnight, found itself getting over 1 million page views and five hundred submissions per day from people all over the globe. Those numbers have been steadily increasing every week. I think DamnYouAutocorrect.com immediately struck a chord because people of every age can relate to it.

These days, everyone texts, and the content highlights situations weve all been in ourselves. And even if we havent, its just human nature to enjoy voyeuristically peering in on the hilariousand often cringe-worthytext fails our peers have experienced. And there have been some real doozies. This book is packed with three hundred hilarious imagesmost of which are found for the first time herethat highlight the unintentional hilarity that often ensues when Autocorrect goes wrong. These laugh-out-loud funny examples include: Co-workers talking about their ejaculation reports (escalation);A husband texting his wife that he laid the babysitter (paid);A cook warning someone not to touch a bowl of masturbating cherries (macerating);And of course, friends complaining about how much they hate the dreaded auto erection feature on their smartphone. And then theres the most popular image on the DamnYouAutoCorrect.com website to date: a father texting his daughter that he and his mother were going to divorce, when they were in fact just going to Disney .

Oops! Ill take texts I wouldnt want to receive for $200 please, Alex. BUT WHAT IS AUTOCORRECT, ANYWAY? Autocorrect is a software functioncommonly found on many smartphones and portable web-ready devices like the iPod Touchthat attempts to correct common typos on the fly by guessing the word you were really trying to write. In theory, Autocorrects ultimate goal is to save time by automating spell check functions and offering predictions, often before youve even finished typing the entire word. But is this feature really improving our modern, super-connected lives? We move fast, talk fast, and type fast, and theres no denying Autocorrect can be a huge help in certain circumstances. It often works as the silent hero in the background, making otherwise illegible sentences like Ehag timr is yge mewtigg show up properly as: What time is the meeting? But not so fast! Unlike Jennifer Anistons hair, Autocorrect isnt always perfect. It has a sinister side tooone that steps in and inserts completely inappropriate words that can make you look like an idiot, a creep, or (gasp!) a total pervert.

The iPhone, for example, frequently autocorrects Whitehouse to whorehouse and homie to homoerotic. If you hit send without carefully proofreading, the conversation will certainly take an interesting turn. And so might your evening. OKAY, SO HOW DOES AUTOCORRECT WORK? As it stands right now, its almost impossible to find information about exactly how the elusive Autocorrect feature works. Its a closely guarded trade secret among the mobile phone companies and software developers, and most of them are incredibly tight-lipped when it comes to discussing it. What we do know is that when you start typing a word, the Autocorrect software checks those letters against a built-in dictionary.

If it doesnt find an exact match, it guesses what you were trying to type and offers that word up as a suggestion. Many smart phones also have some sort of learning element as well, meaning they add new words and terms to the dictionary based on the users behaviors and patterns of use. As a result, after a period of acclimation, no two Autocorrect dictionaries may ever be alike. That means if youre frequently using words like anal or vagina, there may be an increased risk of your Autocorrect, uh, slipping those words in during future conversations. Sexters, beware! HOW CAN THINGS GO SO WRONG? Autocorrect seemingly has a mind of its ownand as youll see in this book, often a hilariously dirty one. The real trouble comes when you hit send without realizing the word you thought you typed was swapped out for something else.

For me, there are two fundamental problems with the way the feature works on the device: First, when youre typing, youre instinctively looking down at the keypad. The autocorrected suggestions, however, show up in the message area, making them incredibly easy to miss if youre typing quickly and not paying close attention. Second, when typing, all you have to do to accept the word suggestion is tap the space bar. Thats it! The only way to get rid of the Autocorrect suggestion is to keep typing more letters, or to hit the little x next to the suggested word in the bubble. Thats just not intuitive at all. Often, you think youre ignoring the word suggestion by just hitting space and continuing to type your message.

But youve done just the opposite. The rest, as they say, is history. Youve just been Autocorrected, my friend! HOLY MOLYBDENUM! THATS TOTALLY HOOSEGOW! DamnYouAutoCorrect.com receives about six hundred new submissions per day from the website and the iPhone/iPod Touch app, and I read every one of them myself to determine if theyre website-worthy (hey, its a hilarious job, but somebodys gotta do it). Ive noticed several trends by doing all that reading, one of which is the relatively new extra letters phenomenon, in which the more you repeat the letter, the more strongly you mean it. For example, people frequently write the phrase: lets gooooooooooooo! Autocorrect dictionaries have no clue how to handle all those extra letters, and on the iPhone, its often autocorrected to lets hookup or lets hippopotamuseither one of which might be incredibly embarrassing, especially if youre talking to a relative or a zookeeper. But thats a topic for another book.

Smartphones also love to insert nonsensical, totally random words that have absolutely nothing to do with what youre talking about. Did someone say something funny? Be careful when replying back with hahahaha, because its often autocorrected to Shabakaan Egyptian pharaoh back in 700 BC. The word hilarious often gets autocorrected to hoosegowa slang term for a prison. And for all my science geeks in the house (holler!), try typing holy moly into your phone. On my device, I end up with holy molybdenum, the chemical element with the atomic number 42. But Im sure you already knew that.