Londoners ducking love to swear. When shot hits the fan, there’s nothing like a vile invective to get us through. We’re not alone: from Sussex to Scotland, the UK has quite the colourful vocabulary. Sadly, our phones don’t feel the same way.
Autocorrect hates swear words. How many times have you needed to let fly “fuck” and found yourself hurling birdlife instead? Sexting quickly goes south when it starts to sounds more like a Christmas panto, asking somebody to “duck”.
We’re fed up with having our cursing censored and we’re all trying to find a way around it. I tried to make shortcuts so that “duck” is automatically changed to its less savoury replacement. Unfortunately if you’re like me and happen to like duck, this causes more problems than it solves. I’ve been known to text my mother on a Sunday with “Mmm, roasted fuck. My favourite”. Cheers Apple.
There seems to be no easy solve for the bad word blanket ban, nor is there an answer as to why it exists in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, Apple executives stop having a say in how I use their phone the moment it leaves the store. They seem to respect this up to a point: after all, I can use it to watch porn. But I can’t easily type the word “shit”.
Clearly someone at Apple decided to go through the dictionary, take out any bad words and refuse to tell us why. Even more surprising is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of us use swear words enough to notice the constant autocorrect. It’s the equivalent of seeing the strings on a Thunderbirds puppet: we know it’s there, we just do our best to ignore it. Apple has another sly trick up its sleeve, a CGI level of craftiness, where they refuse to acknowledge the existence of normal words.
It’s been called the Kill List: some 150,000 words that the iPhone won’t autocorrect if you spell them wrongly. Different iOS’s exclude different words, so they’re hard to track – especially when Apple won’t say squat about the situation. Some of the words are laughably dull while others are incredibly controversial, such as “abortion”.
In previous iOS’s, iPhones didn’t autocorrect misspellings of the word. Spell it “abortiom” and you’d get a big red line but “no guesses found” as to what you could possibly be trying to type. This may have been sorted on the current iPhone but it’s not on other products. Check out the screenshot from this very article: the new Mac has tried to correct vocab to vocal, panto to pants, but “abortiom” – what’s that?
Turns out our inability to fuck, shit and bugger our way around the Apple keyboard is just the tip of a creepy censorship trail from the world’s biggest company. Apple has always paraded its liberality in public but behind closed doors, it appears to be a different story. Its painfully expensive products come already plotting against us.
To add insult to censorship injury, UK users still can’t delete the American keyboard from their phones. It means that we’re constantly doing battle to keep z’s at bay and u’s littering our colours and favours. With the amount of revenue they make in the UK you’d think they’d make our keyboard a standard setting.
Technology and progress have always been synonymous and Apple has always been at the forefront of new tech but its censorship is a decided step backwards. When sexting works better on a typewriter than on an iPhone, something’s got to change. Until it does, we’re recommending a return to some old-fashioned insults and swearwords like London’s home-grown “berk” to keep city stress at bay – but don’t hold your breath. There’s no sign that Apple’s going to be giving a duck anytime soon.
The post iPhone: Can’t We Use Fucking Swear Words on iPhones appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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