The Circles of Grammar Hell

First Circle (Limbo): Autocorrect

Here wander the otherwise virtuous souls who were forced into grievous errors by autocorrect programs. They sit in silent masturbation, only rising once every hour to chant eerie koans such as “ducking auto cat rectal.”[1]

Have you ever done that thing? Got all passionate responding to something on your Facebook timeline using your smart phone (smarty pants phone, more like….), using the ‘Swype’™ keypad, with its ‘intelligent’ autocorrect, and clicked ‘post’ without bothering to scroll through the ridiculously small window at the bottom of the screen to check your incredibly witty, articulate, incisive tirade that you know is just going to make everyone howl with laughter and for which you’ll be rewarded with those serotonin-boosting, life-affirming likes? It’s probably the most embarrassing thing a proofreader can do – send a piece of text out there into the world for all to see, full of schoolgirl errors. The most common of which is, of course, it’s. Or its. That pesky little apostrophe designating possession is one that the spell check doesn’t pick up, and the autocorrect can’t identify whether it’s being used in its rightful place. My phone has an annoying habit of changing ‘and’ to ‘asset’, so I’ve sent texts with all sorts of whats asset wherefores in them. Or, that’s another one. My Swype™ keypad really likes to make or into our, so my poor friends don’t know whether they’re coming our going with me sometimes. I recently talked about hiding my loins to face the horrid weather (check it out on your keypad and see what girding changes itself to….) in order to go out fire a drink, scared I would feel over. This morning, I texted a friend to thank her fur a hare Christmas card she’d sent me, knowing I love hares. I swore to her in response that the mistake was deliberate, but in truth it was my keypad playing one of those little tricks on me. I’m just glad I didn’t thank her fur the hair, otherwise it wouldn’t be laughs I got back in response, but serious doubts about my credentials and mental capacity as a proofreading whizz. I even responded by saying that my swipey keypad has much to advert fit, but the emojis afterwards betray my comic intentions!

That’s the trouble with your own writing. You know what you want to say, your mind is running ahead with itself, but sometimes the typing or ‘swyping’™ simply isn’t fast enough to keep up with the creative juices as they flow through your brain and down to your fingertips. The technology thinks it’s so clever these days, too. It claims to know better than you, anticipating every word as you type the one before, but it’s not as smart as it thinks. Conveying your thoughts in all their subtlety and nuances is a skill beyond the anticipatory algorithms of Mr Zuckerberg’s elves. The wavy red and blue lines of Microsoft can be a useful clue that something is possibly wrong, but if you don’t know what correct looks like, sometimes it can be hard to work out why Word is underlining what to you looks like a perfectly acceptable sentence. Sometimes you can convince yourself it’s doing it just to be vindictive, but more often than not, if you go back and read something out loud it can become clear why it’s underlining in that wavy way it has! (This last piece of advice can be tricky for me to put into practice. You need breath to read my writing out loud; I’m fond of long sentences with lots of sub clauses and the object and verb can get all lost if I’m not careful.)

So, beware the autocorrect. It’s out to get you and condemn you to silent masturbation in the first circle of hell! And it's always the first thing a reader sees when something is out there - the mistake. Believe me!

[1] Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Reimagined for Linguistic Transgressions

JOHN RAUSCHENBERG, November 20, 2017, Mc Sweeney’s Internet Tendency