You know what grinds my gears? - By Jeffrey J. Thivierge

You know what really grinds my gears…?

Autocorrect.

Picture it… A world in which an electronic device is programmed to decipher what you were attempting to type as a word (or words) that actually make sense.  Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  It is.

If you’re over the age of 30, there’s a good chance that you went to school without the luxury of a school-provided laptop.  There’s also a good chance that, at one point or another in your elementary school education, you had regular vocabulary and/or spelling tests that would test your mastery of American English.  (We all know that Canadian English adds the letter “U” in words that we Americans have managed without… words like “flavor” and “color”.)  

I know that my daughter, who managed to survive Westbrook Middle School, had a few vocabulary tests with her favorite teacher.  I question, however, her ability to spell words like “onomatopoeia”  (which is a noun that means:  The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to) without any help from her MacBook Air.  In her defense, it did take my daughter an extra couple days to learn how to spell our ridiculous last name.

As a man of a certain age, I did have the weekly test of 10 to 20 words throughout my youth.  I pride myself in knowing that I won a few spelling bees way back in the day.  As an aside, I don’t even think they hold regular spelling bees in public schools anymore.  I think the cost of getting trophies for everybody was becoming excessive.  But I digress…

As a retired Army Sergeant First Class, I’ve been known to use language that some might consider “coarse” or “salty” at times.  My iPhone, however, has yet to realize that I’ve never once intended to text the word “ducking” and I can guarantee that my use of the word “shut” is far less than what my phone thinks it should be.  Today, it even suggested that I meant to type “beach shirts” when I wrote “bwahahaha”.  (I hate writing “LOL”.  If it’s worth laughing at in real life, I’ll let you know with the text of actual laughter.)

I wonder what will happen to the next generation of children.  The proliferation of technology throughout education will, no doubt, cause a generation of adults that are completely dependent on those very devices to ensure that they are spelling everything correctly.  Either that, or we’ll have a generation of people that both speak and write things like “LOL”, “YOLO”, or “IDK”.  (LOL = Laughing out Loud.  YOLO = You Only Live Once.  IDK = I Don’t Know) Just writing those things has taken a year or two off my life.