Fredericton — A New Brunswick man has recently come to terms with the fact that his phone is always going to assume he meant to type “ducking” or “duck.”
“It’s pretty ducked up that it won’t just let me be me,” lamented Steven Smith, 38, over a text-message interview on the weekend. “But after years of having to delete the autofill and retype the word I obviously intended, it still won’t catch up, so I’m waving the ducking white flag, here.
“Switching phones didn’t even help. I tried to teach my old ducking Samsung to learn how I speak, but nonetheless it also put ‘ducking’ when I clearly meant to type ‘duck.’ Oh, duck it!!”
Smith said his friends have the same problem, so now they’ve collectively just decided that “duck” will now be code for the other word — the one that everyone uses every day, all the time, and that all phones refuse to let us type.
“Society may have to adapt to what the phones want, and not the other way around. How often do people really talk about ducks or ducking? It knows exactly what it’s doing,” he said of his iPhone. “I have lost patience with this ducking autofill and autocorrect. Censorship at its ducking finest, if you ask me.”
Smith said his phone often not only changes his favourite expletive to say “duck,” but will replace that correction with the duck emoji.
“I was trying to message my girlfriend something a little risqué the other day, and ended up sending her the duck emoji by mistake. She said ‘cute!’ Then I followed up with the eggplant emoji and she stopped answering.
“We all know the word we’re trying to say, but these big phone companies are puritans who want to control our language. Well, duck it. Let them, I guess.”
At press time, Smith had attempted to reply to a friend’s message with “god damnit,” which his phone promptly corrected to “good donut.”