Dennis Lewis pleads on Facebook:
Dear God, is there any way to tell Android that I don’t need any help with spelling? I was texting my cousin … highlights of the Palace Kitchen’s Seattle Restaurant Week menu, and I just noticed that my little Kyocera 4G phone changed “arugula salad” to “Caligula salad” and the malted milk “chocolate panna cotta” to “chocolate panda cotta.”
Wonderful substitutes, but nevertheless very irritating.
(Dennis did get advice for turning off auto-correct on his particular cellphone.)
Meanwhile, I’ve been afflicted by auto-correct in WordPress. I type saxual identity (the title of a Zippy), and it’s silently converted to sexual identity. Sometimes the “corrections” are more spectacular, but I have to be eagle-eyed all the time. I haven’t found any way to shut it off.
April 5, 2014 at 4:39 am |
In your previous blog post about the past tense of “text” you mention reference grammars of English. Which of these do you recommend? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one. (I can read German, if there’s a good one in German.)
In Googling examples of tense markers of “text” it might be hard to exclude – in short utterances – that the writer isn’t writing a form of African-American English that has no past tense markers.
April 6, 2014 at 6:42 am |
On reference grammars: an enormous number, ranging from multi-volume works to brief summaries. In the middle are some very substantial single-volume works. The gold standard in this range is now:
Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum, Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002
Probably more suitable for you is:
Huddleston & Pullum. A student’s introduction to English grammar. CUP, 2005.
As for thej past of text, yes, it’s possible that there are some AAVE examples in there. But a number of the examples are clearly not from AAVE speakers.