A man killed his friend and neighbour after sending a text containing the word 'nutter' when he meant to send 'mutter'.
Which just goes to show the importance of correct spelling.
Predictive texting is being blamed, although I thought that filled in the end of a word, not the beginning.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356632/Man-killed-friend-row-mis-spelt-text-message.html
Last edited by: Iffy on Mon 14 Feb 11 at 17:25
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I have sent emails saying;
"How are you toady?"
and
"Brest regards"
It's easily done !
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First thing I do with any phone is turn off predictive text.
Refuse to read the link to the Mail. I did see it properly reported in another newspaper tho.
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...Refuse to read the link to the Mail...
I'm sure that will shake the foundations at Northcliffe House.
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>> ...Refuse to read the link to the Mail...
>>
I've always read as many newspapers as possible for their editorials and opinion pieces on the basis that one should always try to know what the enemy is thinking.......
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None of the nationals will have had a reporter in court, so most of you are reading the same story lifted from the local paper.
To be fair to the Daily Mail, they have acknowledged the source of the story.
Quoting from the Mail: "The Bolton News said: Manchester Crown Court heard the victim had 104 injuries...."
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>> First thing I do with any phone is turn off predictive text.
Me too Zeddo. If you are literate predictive text just turns everything to total gibberish.
I usually have to ask an adolescent or actual child how to turn it off though.
I would add without reading the link that predictive text may have been, ahem, prophetic in this case. It said nutter and the guy was one.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Mon 14 Feb 11 at 18:13
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>> First thing I do with any phone is turn off predictive text.
>>
Same here, drives me nuts.
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>> A man killed his friend and neighbour after sending a text containing the word 'nutter'
>> when he meant to send 'mutter'.
If it's true that the victim's response to receiving the text was to go round to the sender's house with a knife, then perhaps the predictive text software is smarter than we give it credit for.
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>> Which just goes to show the importance of correct spelling.
I agree. It's just a pity that a high proportion of the younger generation maintains that correct spelling isn't important.
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>> I agree. It's just a pity that a high proportion of the younger generation maintains
>> that correct spelling isn't important.
They're just changing it to the new correct spelling.
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A topical connection: it is a peculiarity of Egyptian English to confuse sometimes the letter N with the letter M.
In the seventies, stranded overnight in Cairo, I was looking for a restaurant with a fellow stranded passenger, a Swedish woman on her way back to London after staying with her British oilman boy friend in the Niger delta. The visit to the delta had freaked her out and made her racially paranoid, and she didn't think Cairo looked much better.
We asked some chaps in a grocer's shop if there were any restaurants nearby. They chatted us up and said we should just buy food from them and eat there: look, they had bread, cheese, olives, dates, barrels of dried sardines, oil, etc.
My Swedish companion was looking for what she considered a clean place to sit and finding it difficult. Spotting this, one of the two guys, who were Coptic Christians and spoke comprehensible English, said to her reassuringly: 'It is mice here!'
Well, exactly, I could almost hear her thinking. It was hard not to howl with laughter.
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My mates girlfriend dumped him because of that predictive text.
His text to her read, "I'm going to kick your puppy".
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>> Predictive texting is being blamed, although I thought that filled in the end of a
>> word, not the beginning.
It just inserts the best match for the keys you press, which might change from key press to key press. However it's less likely to change as the word gets longer.
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>> It just inserts the best match for the keys you press
...where (at the risk of stating the obvious) those keys are 'standard' phone keys which have 3 or 4 letters per key.
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It can read your thoughts through your fingertips, and then types what you are really thinking.
It's like making a speech and over-concentrating on avoiding a particular word or phrase. Then before you realise it, out pops the offending word. Like that Gryff Rees-Jones sketch featuring a Mr Hardman.
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I decided to conduct a little investigation and typed in the word "mutter" using predictive text in three telephones of different makes.
Each one showed "mutter". None showed "nutter" or indeed included it as an alternative. It was not in their standard dictionary.
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>> Each one showed "mutter". None showed "nutter" or indeed included it as an alternative.
Tried on 2 different Nokias.
A 6230 only gave one alternative - "Outtes"
An N70 gave three alternatives - "Outtes" again, "Muttes", and "Nutter". I'm guessing I added the word Nutter to the dictionary at some point.
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 15 Feb 11 at 00:55
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Problem is not with predictive text
but down to the fact that people don't read what they have typed before sending.
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>> Problem is not with predictive text
>>
>> but down to the fact that people don't read what they have typed before sending.
I think that the problem is down to violent stupid people with knives.
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A couple more that are easily done, I have done it, and of course are not picked up by a spell-checker:
"Hell Mr Manging Director"
"... I am having a busty day today so may not get back to you immediatley..."
"I hope you had a god weekend"
...
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I usually sign off emails with "Kind regards". It usually gets typed as "Kind retards", however.
The latter is often more apt.
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As per my earlier post I often sign-off:
"Brest regards"
...
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A fatal typo - Hard Cheese
