Friday, March 11, 2022

i DONT know why

Very recently, I wrote that one benefit of blogging and commenting with my iPad is the handy dandy autocorrect function, which is a great benefit to a spastic keyboarder such as I.

While I will stand by that, there are two non-autocorrects that I don't get. I can’t figure why they are not in the arsenal of corrections.

Here i am typing along, and i don't capitalize the i because, well, autocorrect will catch it. It catches many words that involve a capital and fixes them. When I type ipad, for example, it graciously changes it to iPad. That is very cool. And new york is automatically switched to New York. So why leave the standalone i ...um... standing alone in the middle of a sentence? I mean, is there any reason in the world for an i not to be capitalized there (except the odd and unusual case as here when I am using it quite deliberately)?

Then there is the word, dont which autocorrect refuses to change to don't. As far as I know, dont is not a word, but autocorrect chooses to pretend that it is just hunky dory. I get a red squiggly on the computer spellcheck, and when I right click, it suggests changing it to don't, so I do that little thing. But autocorrect dont.

I recognize that this is most definitely a first world issue, and it is not particularly irksome to me. But i (I mean I) can’t quite figure why this is the way that it is. 

And here’s a quick addendum after publishing. I just typed covid in a comment expecting it to be autocorrected to COVID, but it’s only been two years. Eh?

17 comments:

  1. That is very strange. i dont know why it doesnt fix it. typing this on my laptop not autocorrect seems to be on.

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  2. Good catch, John. I have some words which autocorrect and some dont...ha ha, that one didn't! Life sure is strange, as Marcia already said. OK, find another pithy saying, Barb. That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise that is!

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  3. I suspect the reason for the lower case i is because of note taking procedures (when I was a kid anyway) where you started out with Roman numerals, went to capital English letters, went to numbers, lowercase letters and then i, ii, iii, etc.

    Fun fact, English is the only language in the world where one letter by itself is allowed to be capitalized. It never used to be that way way back when but lowercase i was hard to read and so it was capitalized by the 1300's and has been that way ever since.

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  4. I have no clue on why we don't add the apostrophe to dont.

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  5. The keyboard on my phone always autocorrects "don't" to "worry." It is very frustrating!

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  6. And I bet you have owned that program longer than two years.

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  7. I find that odd as well. Dont is a word in French, but not in English to my knowledge. My phone changes my texts/messages to some very odd things so I must proofread.

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  8. Very odd about dont. I don't use autocorrect because it often changes words to something not intended by me, the author. :-)

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  9. I tend to have the odd glitch with auto correct.

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  10. My chief complaint is the dictation mode on my iphone. I use it all the time. And the strange things it comes up with interpreting my voice are sometimes simply absurd! Above all it doesn't recognize my name!

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  11. I am not impressed by my computer's grasp of grammar and spelling.

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  12. My beef is that some sites have auto correct and some don't.

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  13. Wow! That is so weird. Wait a minute. I'm writing this comment with my MacBook air and it doesn't autocorrect anything. It just puts a red line under a misspelled word. I didn't even notice this.

    I like using my iPad, BUT sometimes it won't print a comment I write on someone's blog. It's the weirdest thing.

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  14. I don't have an iPad but can relate to using the phone. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And don't. Dont. Hmmm. That's just plain weird!

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  15. What Ed said. (I just had to change that e to E) But, like you, I don't get 'dont'. Weird. Only in America?

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  16. So many strange things about spellcheck and autocorrect. Definitely a first word problem, but it plagues me, too. LOL! ;)

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