A concerned mother texted her pediatrician to ask if she should switch her 2-year-old from "1 percent milk to whiskey."
Fortunately for her, she didn't end up getting reported to child-protection authorities. The doctor realized that she had been the victim of an autocorrection that had changed "whole milk" to "whiskey."
Nearly everyone who does any sort of electronic communicating has been burned by an autocorrect program that changed a benign message into a major embarrassment. So why don't the programmers fix this problem?
They're trying, but it's not nearly as easy as it might seem to the non-techie world.
Autocorrect originated with word processing programs of the 1980s. The language used was checked against a dictionary to make sure the spelling was correct.
The programs have gotten more sophisticated over the years, but that has created new problems as it solved old ones.
Tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists — or "natural language programmers," as they are known — to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. But one person's hip jargon ("sick" equals "awesome") can be another person's literal undoing ("sick" equals "ill").
A linguistic jungle
Johan Schalkwyk, an engineer who leads speech efforts at Google, said, "Keeping up with slang and trending acronyms is like a jungle" — a jungle full of cultural land mines.