Who decided what I could text?

My phone’s predictive text feature is trying to keep me out of hell, something I’ll be the first to admit is a gargantuan task at this point. Instead of being happy that my phone’s text messaging system was designed by Mother Teresa, I’m just upset because it stifles my ability to fill cell phone land with elegant choruses of profanity. This is extremely troubling because I thought the empty text message screen would be a blank canvas waiting to be painted with my colorful language – after all, profanity is my preferred medium. No, no. Instead of priceless strings of profanity, I’m stuck with such words as dual and duck. These aren’t suitable replacements for words so important to the very core of my profanity hobby. It’s the f-word, for those of you who are slow on the uptake. Ducking just sounds like someone who is trying not to swear, but still wants to sound edgy and bad-A by using forms of the word. By changing just one letter, or only saying the first syllable, you look like a ducking dumb A. Just say the whole ducking word for dual’s sake, because God can hear what you’re thinking too. The f dash dash dash word isn’t alone, as other examples abound. Instead of sh–, I get shiv. A cool word in its own right, but replacing the real word with it often skews the meaning of what I’m trying to say. Example: “I took a shiv” really doesn’t get across what I was trying to say, but makes me sound pretty hardcore. At least shiv is a usable word. To get to the “bi” word, I go through things like citag and chubi. There’s just no feeling involved when you text somebody this: “I hate you. I hope you burn in hell, you son of a citag.” That just sounds strange, like someone trying to speak Elven over World of Warcraft. And apparently in predictive text land, all children have fathers, because the word bastard doesn’t even exist. Texting the phrase, “The bastards are holding me down,” would take forever because I’d have to spell out the main word in the sentence, and after about five tries, I would spike my phone off the floor, just before I have an aneurysm. But the biggest atrocity of predictive text may be ass. I have to wade through four words – if you can call combinations of letters like, app, bps, apr, crs, words – before I get to ass, which isn’t even a really bad word. It’s like the nonalcoholic beer of swear words. It needs a lot of profanity multiplication help before it could offend anyone not dressed in a sweater vest, holding up a you-will-burn-because-you-texted-the-word-ass book. A brief aside: Think of profanity multiplication like adding on certain combos to enhance the score of a trick on Tony Hawk. Except profanity multiplication is much more important than a video game. It’s not just swear words that don’t exist in the awfully boring world of predictive text – words with sexual connotations don’t exist either. Predictive text land doesn’t even have boobs – that’s a problem, and not just in a dirty way, but how are infants going to be nourished? And there must not be any nudie magazines like Playboy or National Geographic in this oddest of lands. That’s not the worst either. Boobs have been replaced with bombs. What a violent turn predictive text has taken. Sad. But I guess you also get combs too – who combs their hair anyway? I know what some of you are saying. Is it really that hard to hit the next button, or just type these words in? First of all, that’s not the point. My predictive text shouldn’t have some buffer between me and what I’d actually like to say. Are you suggesting those words don’t come up because of some childproofing in the system? That’s bullshiv. Second, do you know how hard it is to spell stuff out and scroll through asinine words while you’re trying to drunk text people using your nose because you have a forty of Miller Genuine Draft duct taped to each of your hands? Hard. It’s even hard to drunk text with both hands free. The diminishing motor skills don’t make it easy to hit all the right keys. The combination of the overall mental stupor and blurred vision doesn’t make it easy to remember which letters go with which numbers. Beyond that, your spelling in an intoxicated state reverts back to before hooked on phonics worked for you. Mix the necessity of the next button into that little batch of mayhem, and you get some pretty incredibly unreadable messages. “Dude 4? drunk.” “Of two man. Drunk as shiv.” “We need some got citags over here” “Ducking write.” The amazing thing is, humans can actually carry on a texting conversation like this for hours and completely understand each other. People could find the meaning of life in one of these text sessions, but when they sober up and look through their messages the next morning, there’s no way in hell they could read a sentence of it. All this points to one thing: truly predictive text – a text message system that reads my mind and knows that every time I enter the letter “f,” I intend on adding a “u” and some other consonants to it. Right now, my predictive text is about as predictive as a John Edwards-Miss Cleo lovechild. And until we have the technology to pull off truly predictive text, I’ll be stuck with my ducking piece of shiv excuse for a son-of-citaging, text messaging system.

Dave Baker is a senior majoring in print journalism. Comments and questions can be sent to Da.bake@aggiemail.usu.edu.