Friday links! This sounds familiar edition

Mike Thurau—sorry it's pixelated. It's his headshot, because he's a columnist.

 

Yesterday afternoon, gentleman of leisure Aaron Galbraith sent me a link to this post on TabooJive.com,* in which Mike Thurau considers an odd phenomenon of the iPhone’s autocorrect feature. I was familiar with the name Mike Thurau from our own Combat! blog Comments section; I was also familiar with the post, since I wrote it. The beauty of the internet is that you can copy an entire piece of writing, paste it into a text document with your name at the top, and send that text document to some editor without even having to type anything. Okay, you have to type the query email—“attached is a short piece about an amusing iPhone function my friend discovered”—but there are a lot of templates out there. I initially thought that the Norberto King thing was the only piece of my writing Mike Thurau had plagiarized. Then I found this select-all copy of a Combat! blog post about unboxing videos. Then I found a whole bunch more.

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Norberto King, American

The image above comes from A. Ron Galbraith’s Facebook feed, through which he gave it to the world with the caption “let’s get real here, autocorrect.” The autocorrect function on the iPhone and similar touchscreen devices works by trying different permutations of the letters nearest the letters you hit. You can map “Norberto king” to its deliberately-struck neighbors nicely, right up until you get to the O. At that point, autocorrect moves from likely mistakes to wishful thinking. For Apple, a company that has built its reputation on cannily assessing how people use their consumer electronics, to assume that Aaron probably wanted to say “Norberto king” rather than the common intensifier he typed perfectly seems, well, naive. Consider their alternative, though, which is to add “motherfucking” to their autocorrect dictionary. While thousands of Americans like myself would find it easier to send text messages about our dentists and burritos, a small number would be upset. Somewhere in Kansas, a woman mourning the death of her beloved friend Norberto would text a fellow church deacon to ask if he was going to the motherfucking funeral, and that would be it. Our phone autocorrects’ willful insistence that we meant to type “what the duck” is a manifestation of the same phenomenon that makes it okay to shoot fifty people in a PG-13 movie, but not okay to show a boob or a cigarette. Most of us have no problem with boobs or smoking, but the few who do are extremely vocal. Thus does the public tolerance of a society move to the level of its least tolerant members. That’s a curious nuisance for most people, and a life-determining problem if you’re, say, a gay dude who wants to get Norberto King married.