Con-Text

I support T9 Word.

I'm not saying you have to agree, so don't get your knickers in a knot.  You should know by now that a blog post isn't generally four words long, since I am a verbose sesquipedalian.  And I intend to give that opening statement its usual attention and expansion, so that you will fully understand why I said such a thing.

I am aware that most new-fangled cell phones (including mine) now have keyboards for our thumbs.  I do not care.  I use T9 Word every day (unless I am on mobile Facebook, which hates me as much as regular Facebook does, and therefore hates T9 Word probably just because I like it).  I have been described as a "T9 fiend" by GreenFriend, who watched in amazement as my muscle memory took over one night.

As a person who hates talking on the phone with the fiery passion of one thousand suns, I have become an avid texter.  Texting makes it easy for me to avoid actual human contact by making it possible for me to communicate simple concepts sans vocal chords.  No more do I have to actually call and speak to my mother just to ask her if she wants something from WalGreen's!  Text messaging to the rescue!

This loss of verbal phone communication has been bemoaned by many-a scholarly person.  The swift onset of "txt-spk" being one of the lamentable side-effects of the spike in dependance on texting, the intelligent human beings of Earth are (accurately) projecting a directly proportional degeneration in the spoken word. 

However, as I have stated before, my texting is grammatically immaculate (betcha think that's more impressive now that you know I use T9 to do it).  So this is not a fear I apply to myself.  And I hate the phone.  So I'll text until the day my thumbs fall off.

But that's just the justification for my initial sentence.  Now I will tell you the real reason I am a fan of predictive texting:

T9 Word makes me giggle.

Seriously!  Some of the suggestions it foists on me are like little gifts from above, sent to cheer me in a world of gray winter doom.

I know that T9 has its drawbacks, specifically when it comes to small words.  If you want to type "me," T9 inevitably gives you "of" first.  If you want to type "go," T9 insists you want to say "in."  And I can't tell you how many times I have furiously backspaced after typing "I an" instead of "I am."

T9 also has a startling ability to recall every fake word you have ever typed or selected by accident.  My current phone decided that when I tried to type "its," I would always mean "Gtr."  I don't know what "Gtr" is, but it made me want to growl at the screen every time.  It also has a strange attachment to the word "sacred," over "scared," to the point that I actually spent a significant amount of time selecting "scared" from the drop-down list over and over and over and over and over to teach it the better habit.

But my old phone would not be taught.  I had a very small, very inexpensive phone when I was first venturing into the world of texting.  After I figured out how T9 worked, my phone showed its strange quirk.  Whenever I tried to type the word "think," my old phone invariably inserted this collaboration of letters: "thhok."  I am absolutely positive that I never typed that odd-looking word (perhaps it's an onomatopoeia?).  To this day, I believe that my phone was insulting my intelligence; clearly it didn't thhok I could think at all.

But despite these little time-consuming setbacks, I find T9 word to be intensely amusing.  There are several specific examples I like a lot.  To the point that I actually select the wrong thing on purpose before typing the correct word, because I don't want it to learn new habits for these particular things.

The first of these encouraged failures occurred when I tried to call my mother ancient (I was being sarcastic).  My text ended up saying, "Mother, you are so ambient."  I actually laughed out loud (no, I didn't lol.  Don't use that abominal abbreviation around me, please [also note that the word "please" has multiple vowels, and is therefore not spelled "plz"]).  I couldn't decide if calling a person "ambient" was a compliment or an insult.  But I think it is probably a compliment.

I just discovered a new enjoyable one a few minutes ago, when I was responding to Ex-BF-in-Law about PinkFriend's upcoming birthday.  I wanted to say, "Since I have zero clones or doppelgangers..."  And now I am purposefully not going to speculate what you may or may not be thinking about the kind of text conversations I have.  "Doppelgangers" is hardly a commonly used word, so T9 understandably did not know it.  My text ended up reading, "Since I have zero clones or forefingers..."  I will admit to emitting a few audible chuckles while I painstakingly taught my T9 to recognize "doppelgangers" as a word.

A golden oldie, and the one I am most careful to preserve, is one that came about after I started getting Predators Tweets to my phone.  As any good Preds fan knows, the very impressive Preds goalie is spectacularly named: Pekka Rinne.  Were you aware, however, that the same numbers it requires to type "Rinne" in T9 Word are also the numbers necessary to type "phone?"  Of course you weren't.  But guess what?  Every time I go to type "phone," I get to be reminded of one of the best hockey players living in the shadow of the Batman Building.

The last one I like is kind of... um... petty.  You see, my dramatic, whiny saga with BlueEyes sort of began with the introduction of a girlfriend.  This girlfriend was an extremely nice person, and very good for him.  But you can understand, since I am sort of a mess over him, why I didn't exactly warm to her.  Although he is no longer with this girlfriend, seeing her name still makes my heart go all achey and weird.  So when my T9 Word automatically corrects her name to "malaria"... well, it comforts me for myriad reasons.

T9 is just one of those things for me.  It's one of those things that can always make me giggle, even on days when I would rather scowl at the world and wrap up in my socially challenged cocoon.

You know what I'm talking about.  For some people, it's seeing highly amusing Engrish somewhere, like, "Unbelievable! This Is Not Butter," slapped on the top of a tub of I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter.  For others, it might be seeing that the Adult Store sits under a towering billboard that says, "Jesus is watching you!"  And sometimes it might be as simple as driving by a Feminist Bake Sale.

We have daily recommendations for how much water we should drink, how much Vitamin C we should take in, and we even have a completely unrealistic recommendation for vegetables (eight servings?  I say no, sir!).

I tend to think we should have daily recommendations for other things.  Things like how many times you should laugh until your sides hurt.  Or how many times a single girl should flirt with a handsome stranger.  Or, like the examples above, how many servings of irony you should take in.

Hey, at least I didn't focus on my overexaggerated love for puns.