I have a group message on my phone with my roommate from freshman year and my best friend, who lived across the hall from us. We all have iPhones, and we have all messed up a message from time to time, but none were really memorable until one of us tried to type the word “bitch” and the phone autocorrected it to “virch.” Virch isn’t even a real word! We thought it was hilarious that our smartphone corrected our bad language to a made up word. We actually still use virch instead of bitch in that group message. Autocorrect really took away the impact of whatever we meant to say, and while it simply turned into an inside joke, it could easily change the impact of a message that is actually important. I think if we just slowed down enough to read through our messages before we send them and fix any autocorrect mistakes, we wouldn’t have quite as many inside jokes, but we would also send what we actually mean more often.

Filed under: P2