Autoconfusion

"She recently had lost much with Rick and Pam."

That was a sentence in an otherwise clear email I received recently from a friend from high school. But what did it mean? What had been lost? What did Rick and Pam have to do with it? Instead of emailing back for an explanation, I decided to call my friend, Judy. Nothing had been lost, she told me. Linda, another high school friend, had simply had lunch with Rick and Pam, two other friends from high school.

It's nice to know that after more than 60 years, we Swanton Bulldogs remain connected, and also that Linda, Rick and Pam hadn't actually lost anything. So what happened in that email? Blame autocompletion.

When you are writing on a computer or phone, the device seems to look over your shoulder and try to complete your thoughts, correct your errors and save you trouble. Sometimes this works nicely and actually does save time and trouble. Other times it just gets you into more trouble, as in the above email. We can only imagine what series of typos and "corrections" turned "had lunch" into "had lost much," thanks to autocompletion, One needs to read over everything you have written with great care, which of course takes more time than autocompletion usually saves.

In his book Knowing What We Know, Simon Winchester calls autocompletion a "somewhat diabolical and wholly unnecessary nuisance, the bane of the writer's life."  

Smilin' Ed and Froggy

When I was a kid back in the 1950s I loved a Saturday morning TV show featuring a puppet named Froggy the Gremlin, about whom we often heard the catchphrase "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy." The best part of the show, as far as I was concerned, came when Smilin' Ed McConnell and later Andy Devine tried to tell a story, while Froggy, in effect, autocompleted his sentences in outrageous ways, greatly irritating Smilin' Ed or Andy to the amusement of children like me.

It was great fun. Then. Now I sympathize more with Smilin' Ed and Andy. Do we really need a Froggy the Gremlin in our phones and computers?