Indulge me in a little Friday rant. I like predictive text on my handsets, I really do. Makes things a lot easier — most of the time. But I never cease to be amazed at some of the words in the dictionary. It’s something of a rite of passage for a new handset when I overwrite “shiv” and add “shit” to the dictionary for the first time, but it’s sort of silly. Would it really kill anybody to put that in there? And do people use the word “shiv” more than “shit”?
Earlier, I was typing an SMS about the band The Verve coming to town. “Verve” wasn’t in the dictionary, which was a little surprising, but the choices it gave me were “teste,” “veste” and “verte.” Teste, sure, that’s a word, but I’m pretty positive it’s one I’d never use in a text. “Veste” and “verte,” as far as I can tell, aren’t English words. (I don’t generally write messages in other languages, but I can see how predictive text might get even more irritating for people who do.)
Obviously this isn’t a big deal, but it’s slightly annoying to type out a word using predictive text, only for the phone to not recognize it and suggest some non-word instead, at which point you’ve got to triple-tap your original word to add it to the dictionary. Say I want to tell a friend to meet me at Caesar’s Palace here in Vegas. I go to type “Caesar” and it gives me “Bearar”. Bearar doesn’t appear to be a word in English, nor the root of one — so why’s it in the predictive text dictionary at all?
Like I said, not a big deal, and it’s as amusing as it is annoying to see the bizarre non-words it tosses up. What are some of your favorites?
Update Ricky Cadden from Symbian-Guru pointed out this hilarious video on the topic:
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