Jessica Bennett, “When Autocorrect Goes Horribly Wrong” (New York Times, Jan. 9, 2015)
Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.
All of which is fine, except that it turns the notion of the guiltless autocorrect on its head. These days, autocorrections are likely to tell the person on the receiving end something about you.
“A lot of the time, you can’t even replicate it because it’s so personalized,” said Ben Zimmer, the chairman of the new-words committee at the American Dialect Society, which is devoted to the study of the English language.
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