13 April 2012

Texting and Malay Cupertinos

The Cupertino effect is when a typing error gets introduced by an over-enthusiastic spell-checker. The derivation is from cooperation (with no hyphen) being "corrected" to Cupertino (see here). Apparently, there are genuine examples, such as:
The Cupertino with our Italian comrades proved to be very fruitful
and
stimulating cross-border Cupertino
I wonder if there is a word for errors introduced by predictive texting. If you use predictive texting when typing SMSs, you can so easily get caught out. Just yesterday, I sent a message to my wife saying 'I'm tired', but I managed to send 'I'm three' instead! And, on another occasion, I wanted to say 'you should go for it', but I managed to send 'You should on for it' instead.

One other problem is typing Malay. In Microsoft Word, most Malay words get those familiar red squiggly lines underneath, which is just fine. But datang ('to go') gets converted to dating, which has caught me out a few times. I have to remember to remove that item from the list of corrections on each new computer I use.