I gat suit correct

 

…and I do… I so honestly and completely do.

Now, don’t get me wrong… for all the gat I feel, the reality is that suit correct is something that has worked in my favor, and likely benefitted me significantly more often than it has frustrated me. You might say I love suit correct.

But honestly… those times when it doesn’t help out… it tends to make me look like an idiot far more often than it is amusing.

One day a few weeks ago I was sending a text message to a friend… autocorrect updated something, and it updated it in a spectacularly idiotic fashion. Like many of you, I’m sure, I noticed the error after hitting send, and immediately decided to follow up with a simple message…

“I hate autocorrect”

Which in turn I typed too quickly and it too was corrected, and just like that I sent along…

“I gat suit correct”

What?

No. Really. What?

Now we could begin with a long tirade here that continues piling on to autocorrect. But that might be too easy. So…

Let’s check out the alternative it provided. Because, for me the frustrating part is how so often the corrections completely ignore my original intentions.

Do you know what gat means?

There are actually a few possibilities.

First up is slang for a gun. Since I have no desire to shoot any suit of mine, we can move right along.

Second is a channel, or some kind of passage, that may occur naturally or artificially… and you also might find that this passage definition might have something to do with an Old Norse transition from an Old English word for a gate.

Do enough research, and you’ll find other things such as references to gat as an older version of the word get.

Where we end up is that apparently -- instead of hating autocorrect -- in order to fix my suit, I needed to keep moving through the gate.

Yeah… no… not my intention.

And none of this helps me out when autocorrect fixing mistakes that isn’t a mistake… adds or removes apostrophes without any apparent consistent reason… and all of the other annoying habits of the process.

It also doesn’t help with the idea that should you even consider turning autocorrect off, the errors that are likely to begin slipping through an Old Norse passageway and into your text and email content will explode with a frequency quite likely beyond your comprehension.

And so it’s a trade I make… the corrections I see happening that I’m thankful took place outweigh the frustrations of the suit correct I gat so much. And it’s probably a trade you willingly make as well.

If you have any comments or questions, please e-mail me at Bob@inmybackpack.com