My brother John brightens the Mondays of a lot of people with his Pixlist, a nature photograph and some snappy commentary which he makes available on Monday mornings.  This morning, besides telling me a good bit about how tendrils of the Bur Cucumber grow, he offered this little comment.  I think of it as a sua culpa.  I’ll come back to sua culpa. Here is what he said.

Everything starts out tiny.  This is an apical meristem, the growing point of one of those 20 foot stems of Bur Cucumber climbing over the Bitternut Hickory (not the Butternut Hickory as I said last posting—twice.)  The “i” and “u” keys are right next to each other but I claim to have been victimized by the autocorrect function). 

As intrigued as I was by the gyrations of the Bur Cucumber, I was really taken over by “victimized by the autocorrect function.”  As you see by the title, I am moving in the direction of “autocorrect tyranny,” even though I know that is a bridge too far. 

What I’d like from an autocorrect function is a polite question.  I hear it the way I would hear it from one of my more polite friends.  “Pardon me, Dale, did you mean “Bitternut?’  This calls my attention to what I have actually written and ask if that is what I intended to write.  That’s a nice touch.

But if I am not notified, then someone else’s sense of what I meant to write is being substituted for mine.  Imagine a very quick consultation among the subsystems that constitute the autocorrect function.

He just typed Butternut.  

Do you think he meant Bitternut.

Very likely.  Of the last 100,000 uses of the two words, Butternut was almost always the intended word.

Do you think we should put a wavy red line under the word so he has a chance to decide?

We can’t do that.  A wavy red line means the spelling is incorrect and he has correctly spelled another word.

Well then, maybe a wavy green line?

But that doesn’t mean anything.  Even if he saw it, he wouldn’t know what it meant. Just leave Butternut in.  It’s probably what he meant.

Don’t you think we ought to ask him?

You know there is not efficient way to do that and we are—please remember—all about efficiency.  That is what he bought and that is what we are providing.

So long as I don’t get to make the choice, the “judgment” of the autocorrect function—maybe autocorrect dysfunction—is going to prevail.  And I don’t get to say what I mean.

And by the way, when I said, in Latin, that it was the fault of the autocorrect function, I wrote sua culpa—your fault—instead of mea culpa, “my fault.” I said I was going to come back to that. The Usage Overlord changed it to “sea,” because that is a more common use of those letters.  I had to go back and put it into italics before it would allow the usage at all.  It had no trouble at all with the “mea” in mea culpa.  I guess more people claim it is their fault than say “it is your fault.”

And probably it is more often my fault. But not this morning.