I, like many of you no doubt, have always enjoyed those amusing errors in texting caused by predictive text choosing the wrong word or a slip of a finger meaning you type the opposite of what you intended. I don't have to give you examples. You've all got ones that have sprung to mind and made yourself laugh more than I could ever hope to.
My latest phone is a blackberry and thus uses a keyboard set out like a typewriter with two letters on each key. You type what you want and the phone will decide on which word you were probably going for, but give you options along the way which you can shift to quite easily if you can be bothered to look. I think it even remembers which words you most commonly uses and defaults to them when there is a choice. Annoyingly and I don't know why, it has decided when I press QW, UI, L, L, that I am trying to spell "qull" instead of "will". I don't know why. I very rarely use the word qull in everyday texting. In specch quite often. Often in creative writing. I am qull that way.
Today though I was trying to wrtie "kerfuffle" in a text. That's the kind of person I am. It was a text about a magpie in my heart pecking at my aorta and causing a kerfuffle. I suspect I am the only person ever to have written a text on that subject. However, kerfuffle was not a word that my phone dictionary was familiar with and it instead chose to interpret my tappings as the word "jerfuddle" which I found a much more preferrable description of the magpie/aorta status. I am amazed no-one has come up with that word before- jerfuddle - it's beautiful and created by a computer. A computer with supposedly no soul or creativity, but perhaps lightning has hit it and my phone is alive. Whatever. Having created this word I propose we now use it to mean any word that is accidentally thrown up in place of an intended one by use of predictive text. That'sa jerfuddle. Please try and popularise that amongst your friends and see if my phone can end up making more contribution to the English language than I have in my twenty year writing career.
