Ducking an iPhone Annoyance

Thrill your friends when they find “fucking fuck” in your phone book!

You can also just turn off autocorrect as of the 2.2 firmware. (I seriously would have gotten rid of my iPhone if this wasn’t the case.)

Clever fix. Very Woz.

Now that is a pretty ducking sneaky solution. I’d best get the duck out of here and fix up my ducking picky little ducker of an iPod touch pronto.

Thanks.

Ducking brilliant. Hope I don’t have to share my addressbook anytime soon.

Saw this courtesy of Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/12/04/ducking

Thanks for the tip.

Mulder, please think bigger picture, here: “fucking” is not the only word that is problematic. Indeed, until I turned off predictive input on my new Touch, I was continually frustrated by the things’s insistence that my name was, in fact, “J. Kong” (I was typing lowercase for a user name). It’s stupidity like that which is the real problem; “ducking” is just one symptom amongst many.

Be happy that you’re not German (or Austrian or Swiss). The German spell checking on the iPhone is atrocious (much worse then on the Mac). It will constantly put Umlauts on everything and change valid words into Lewis-Caroll-worthy concoctions. It ruins every single sentence. You would have to fill your Address Book with 100s of fake contacts to amend that. In fact, some people have done that…

Mulder’s comment makes me want to face-duck him/her/it.

Awesome! Going to add a link to this from my blog!

Whose phone number did you enter in that contact book entry? ;-)

My personal problem with the iPhone auto-correction is that I type in more than one language on a regular basis. Since I type in English most frequently I have it auto-correct that, but as soon as I try to write a quick email to a friend in anything but English, I have to press the ‘little x’ after every single word I type.

PS. Profanities can be very useful at conveying emotion.

As I drove into Tijuanna (where there have been many murders lately) from San Diego, my girlfriend texted me to let me know I forgot the cookies she baked.

I tried to text her back “SHIT! in TJ call you later.”. The spell checker changed it to “SHOT! in TJ call you later” and I didn’t notice.

She freaked and I didn’t get her reply for hours. She was so worried.

I had no idea how much I used the word “fuck” until I started using the iPhone.

‘Luoma’, that sounds like a Finnish surname.

A glimpse behind the scenes of predictive dictionary compilers:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6hcoT6yxFoU

Profanity does serve a valid linguistic purpose, in that it emphasises sentiments and communicates a particular mood. It has a downside in that it also offends some people, but that does not negate the first point. Provided it’s not over-used, it fulfils a need. Personally, I’m not offended by use of profanity for emphasis, but where it becomes so overused that it’s effectively no more than punctuation, that offends me. For example:

“Pass the salt, please” - fine.

“Pass the fucking salt.” - clearly someone who is frustrated or irritated, and emphasising the message. It’s a warning sign (as it should be), but it’s still communicative, and the word gives additional information.

“Fucking pass the fucking salt, fucker.” - someone who lacks verbal skills, linguistic finesse and taste. This person is not someone I’m likely to want to have a conversation with. Aside from offence, chances are it’d be boring. The only exception would be when it’s humorously used in a post-modern sense, but that exception applies to almost any linguistic quirk.

Fantastic! I think I’ll be expanding my list of contacts later today. Maybe I’ll create a profane contacts group, oh what fun.

Mulder makes people on this thread look like mental midgets. As he said, continual cursing is evidence of lack of creativity and limited vocabulary. In addition, it makes a person appear stupid. Cuss words should be saved for when one means to be emphatic.

I haven’t had a problem with predictive typing despite being a Day One purchaser of an iPhone. Could be because I’ve never typed ‘fucking’ into one.

I am the president of jlist.com and I am so sick of it thinking I want to type joist.com. Ducking thanks.

Interesting, how many here seem to think that profanity is some sort of brave statement or human right.

Profanity carries a gestalt — it conveys with it a strong subtext of poor impulse control. Have you ever heard someone swear outside their native language? The words just lack the sheer emotional impact that would come with the same verbiage from a native speaker. In fact, it’s often hilarious, and almost never offensive.

You convey literal meaning with language, of course, so speaking of damnation in a religious sense or bull crap in a farming sense is reasonable, and reasonable people filter this automatically.

When an adult uses profanity, however, it conveys (as I said above) poor impulse control (hereafter PIC) — similar to other signifiers like tattoos and nose rings, daytime drunkenness and an inability to comb one’s hair.

There are many places where PIC is not such a problem — jail, rock concerts, etc. Someone may have attributes that outweigh their PIC, and their success is often seized upon as evidence that PIC is not really a problem anymore. This is, of course, a fallacy (confirmation bias, anecdotal evidence, etc…)

In most human interactions, however, one constantly evaluates one’s counterparts for “trustworthiness”. There are a number of subtle facial, behavioral and verbal cues one uses for this process — sometimes correctly, and sometimes erroneously (shifty eyes and hunched shoulders on one end, ethnic prejudice on the other).

One of these indicators of trustworthiness is a willingness to respect standing taboos, whether serious or not — it shows respect, intelligence, care and maturity. When trust (real trust) is an issue, a cavalier and profane attitude toward social norms WILL INDICATE A DEGREE OF UNTRUSTWORTHINESS. (For an example, examine your reaction to the preceding capslock love affair.)

So — profanity, or violations of social norms may not be inherently damaging, though this is not excluded. It does, however, drive an untrustworthiness evaluation in a significant number of people. You may, of course, be happy with this — more power to you.

People in society at large who have reached emotional maturity, however, display their victory over PIC by expressing themselves well and clearly, without resorting to vulgarity.

I will stipulate, however, that there are subcultures where the standard social mores are rejected. Participants in these subcultures have different taboos that are nevertheless enforced strictly.

So — if you are interacting with people in general, profanity is juvenile. That’s just reality. Self-righteousness is also juvenile. As is an unhappy reaction to another’s self-righteousness. What I see in posted response to Mulder’s post (which was not self-righteous) is self-deception — which is also a demonstration of PIC. :)

It doesn’t even have to be in the name field to get it through the profanity. If you don’t want it immediately visible from the Contacts list, you can tuck it into the job title of someone or a restaurant, and it seems to work just fine. In my case, the call box for my apartment building’s job title is now “fcking fck f*cker.”

Instead of making a contact simply make a new note in the Notes app. with all of the words and names that you like but your iPhone dislikes.

Clever solution but, an even better fix is to teach your phone to swear by sending an email yourself that simply reads ‘fucking fucking fucking’. After you’ve canceled the little auto-correct pop-up about 3 times the iPhone will learn the word. In fact I’m pretty sure you don’t even have to send it, you just have to kill the pop-up a few times and it remembers.