Today’s Rant: Do NOT Correct Me, TwAppGoogleSoftBook

[UPDATE]:

I finally figured out how to disable the universal autocorrect. You open System Preferences, go to Language & Text, click on the “Text” menu, and there’s a box which you can uncheck which says “Correct spelling automatically.”

Here ya go:

See, this is why I love Apple. No other product gives me that sense of satisfaction and well-being that comes from figuring out how to make it stop annoying the hell out of me.

You are hereby absolved from reading the rest of this post. All is well.

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I do not update my technology very often, not because I’m a Luddite, but because I find every new incarnation of a device or app I use contains some horrible new “improvement” which invades my privacy or does something I don’t want or no longer functions as it once did. But as you all know, last week my creaky old MacBook went kaput and I had to buy a new one.

This one is about three generations more advanced than my old one. Instead of being gently lulled into that Brave New World with successive OS tweaks and software fixes, I’ve had to leap headlong into the modern era, and it’s like jumping into a pool of cold water. This laptop has a click pad which inexplicably makes things bigger if I rest my hand on it the wrong way. Also, as I’ve mentioned, WordPress no longer gives me a scroll bar to select “categories” and “tags.” That’s not so bad for tags, since you can just type them in, but for categories you really need to be able to scroll down the list. Inexplicably, the scroll bar appeared maybe twice? I don’t know what made that happen, but regardless, I can’t seem to repeat that scenario. Yes, FYWP.

But by far the worst “improvement” is the universal autocorrect, which I have yet to figure out how to disable. In the new Macs universal autocorrect will correct your typos as you type, regardless of what application you are in. Whether I’m on WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Pages, Scrivener, mail, or commenting on someone’s blog, my Mac will autocorrect me as I type along.

While this may sound like a good thing on paper, in reality it is the most evil fucking thing ever invented. I type really fast and I do make mistakes but I also 99.99% of the time correct them, because under the old system a typo was very obvious. Now my Mac corrects me as I go along, based on what it thinks I meant to say, and the misspelled word is no longer underlined so I haven’t even realized I’ve made a typo. Sadly, more often than not it picks the wrong fucking word. So, for example, last night I sent an email to someone and used the word “reply” but universal autocorrect changed it to “replay,” something I only noticed when my correspondent replied back to me. I look like an idiot.

Even worse, I use a lot of different language in my writing, neologisms and expressions like “whaaaaa!” or maybe even a French or Spanish word or two. When I’m writing fiction I write dialogue, and that means things like “Whi-” (stage direction: interruption). And no, MacBook, that was not meant to be “whig.” Thanks for caring, though.

People, I would much rather have an obvious typo in my copy than the wrong fucking word. Dear God but this is awful. I now look like an illiterate asshole, not an asshole who can’t type.

The absolute last thing anyone wants is their computer telling them what it thinks they meant to say. Make it stop. Please.