My Cell Phone Lives A Couple Centuries Back.

Yeah, a lot of posts today. Product of a busy week and a pad to jot ideas on.

Noticed something interesting about my cell a couple days ago.

If you're not familiar with T9Word, it's a texting program that's fairly common on a lot of cell phones these days, or at least some variant of it, designed to make typing on a phone without a full keyboard a little bit easier. And it does do that, most of the time. It takes guesses at what you're typing as you type it so you don't have to make as many button presses.

But it also does this by having a sort of bank of common words, and when two different words occupy the exact same numeric space, it will guess the more common word.

I was asking someone about borrowing a plate of theirs, but T9 didn't recognize "plate."

It put in "slave."

...When has "slave" been a more commonly used word than "plate?" I realize slavery still exists, yes, but it's not exactly part of casual speech any more, and seems especially out-of-place in that regard for a program that accepts "dude" as a recognized word. I mean, think about it. There are really only three contexts "slave" is used in outside the taboo subject of real, present-day slavery, none of which seem like they'd be part of your average texting conversation:
1) in a historical context
2) in an S&M context
3) as a fairly uncommon verb meaning "to do something in a slavelike manner," i.e. "I've been slaving away all day on this."

Four uses, possibly, if you include Jimmy O'Teen's whining that having to trim the front yard hedges is slave treatment. But...more common than "plate?" Really?

Thanks for giving me that day's eyebrow-raise, T9Word.


Holden Out.