The title says it all.

I think autocorrect is trying to gaslight me.

(The irony that my spellchecker is underlining the word in red, and offering me spellings of "auto correct", "auto-correct", and "corrector", is not lost on me. 😀 I have now added that word to my dictionary as the underlining is going to drive me insane.)

For those not familiar with the term,

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group [or a piece of software!] covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment.

...

The term originates in the systematic psychological manipulation of a victim by her husband in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light,[6] and the film adaptations released in 1940 and 1944.[7] In the story, the husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment and insisting that she is mistaken, remembering things incorrectly, or delusional when she points out these changes. The play's title alludes to how the abusive husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions. He further uses the lights in the sealed-off attic to secretly search for jewels belonging to a woman whom he has murdered. He makes loud noises as he searches, including talking to himself. The wife repeatedly asks her husband to confirm her perceptions about the dimming lights, noises and voices, but in defiance of reality, he keeps insisting that the lights are the same and instead it is she who is going insane.[8]:8 He intends on having her assessed and committed to a mental institution, after which he will be able to gain power of attorney over her and search more effectively.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

(obviously the italicized and bolded words were mine 😀)

I have seen the Ingrid Bergman film adaption, and frankly, it is apropos.

Now I should explain that I have a love/hate relationship with autocorrect. I love it when I am on my phone, typing with one finger, and I spell Ill (That is an 'i' followed by 2 L's) and it changes it to I'll for me. Same for well to we'll, etc. When you are typing with one finger, any help you can get is appreciated.

And in that same vein, on smartphones/tablets when autocorrect offers suggestions for words--where you only type a few characters, then tap the word you meant--that can be a real time saver.

But autocorrect also has a downside (or should I say dark side?); namely, when it changes what you type to the wrong word. Now early on, this was the source of immense amusement. So much so that it led to sites such as https://www.autocorrectfail.org/ Just go through some pages of that site. I'll wait.

This changing of a correct word to a wrong word tends to trigger my anal retentive side. Now to truly understand this, you should know something else about me. I went to a very good public high school. I knew I had good teachers, but just how good I only truly appreciated years later. And here, regarding this, I refer to my English teachers.

Those who went to my school will know what I am talking about. For example, my senior English teacher grilled us to prepare us for the SATs (college entrance exams). He wanted only the best for us, but it sure wasn't easy. He made us study and tested us on 20 vocabulary words every week: definitions, antonyms, synonyms, the gamut. That was just a given.

We also had a senior term paper. Assigned in the fall at the beginning of the school year, it was not due until May, just a month before graduation. We got to pick our own author. We had to have a minimum of six (6) primary sources (books by the author) and ten (10) secondary sources (books/articles about the author). I can't stress enough that this was BEFORE the public Internet existed. So we are talking libraries, card catalogs, the works. And as I lived in a rural area, it meant having to drive a minimum of 1/2 hour or more to get to a university library. Oh, and I did not have a car.

Our papers had to be a minimum of 10 pages (I think... it has been a long time), typed, 1" margins on all sides, no orphan lines, etc. (Keep in mind that this was at a time when typewriters were still the norm. That's right, no MS Word. And my high school typing room had all Smith Corona electric typewriters--so no whiteout ribbon--with just 2-3 IBM Selectrics in the back row. So yes, typing a paper for most meant having the entire term paper written out by hand first, making sure there were no mistakes, and only then typing it up. Because having to add a word or line here or there might mean having to retype several pages over again.)

The killer was that if he found a single typing mistake or spelling error in our paper, we got a ZERO (0). That's 9-10 months of work down the drain, and your grade with it. So that should give a sense for how we were conditioned. And that has carried me through my entire college and life career. [I will skip the arguments I had with my freshman English professor about what was and what was not proper English.]

In fact, that grilling led to not only my SAT scores being in excess of 1300, but years later, when I decided I wanted to go for a Masters in Computer Science, it led to my first GRE (Graduate Record Exams) scores including hitting the 91st percentile in English and the 90th percentile in math (and I like math!). (Mr. Poecker, wherever you are, I cannot thank you enough.)

[Side note: I still remember the day we had to tell him which author we were doing our paper on. I had chosen Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World", as I had read that in 9th grade. And I figured Huxley was obscure enough that I could shovel my way through it. But when Mr. Poecker came to my desk and I told him my choice, he lit up with a smile and said, "Oh, the druggie!" And my first thought was, "...Wait, what??" Needless to say, things went a bit different than I had anticipated. That term paper itself is a whole different story, but that will have to wait for another time.]

I do not tell you all this to impress you. I tell you this to impress upon you that I take writing rather seriously. And I have the background to go with it. (My wife likely could tell stories about my proofreading her dissertation. I know some of my undergrad friends have already.) So having autocorrect change something I knew to be correct to an incorrect word was... irritating.

HOWEVER, in the past year or two, I have begun to notice a pattern. And I am pretty sure it is not me. For example, as I was typing this post, I am SURE that I typed the word "typing" several paragraphs ago. But when I looked up just now, I saw that it said "tying". And THIS is what I am referring to. I think autocorrect is, frankly, f*king with me.

Then there are the cases where I know exactly what it is that I want to type, I type that, and autocorrect goes and changes my word(s) to something incorrect! That drives me batsh*t crazy! Having a computer actually screw up your typing when you are someone like me conjures up images of cartoons where someone puts their fist right through the screen of a computer.

It has happened so often, and my trust level of autocorrect is so low now, that my usual workflow anymore is that

• I type something
• I proofread it (usually several times... do not ask me how many times I have reread this post already)
• and then once I post it, I re-read it yet again

And the number of times that I have found typos, typos that I am sure I did not make, is abnormal. The only saving grace I have is that some of the applications I use, such as Slack and MS Teams, allow you to edit a post after the fact. (That is a very nice feature.) But for Messages, email, and some other applications, once you commit, you commit. So I have to live with it.

Now things got so annoying at one point that I flat out turned off autocorrect altogether system-wide. I figured, "The heck with this. I will just do all my own corrections as I go."¹ And only then did I realize how much of a crutch autocorrect had become. I was in the habit of typing things like well and letting autocorrect fix it to we'll for me, and in time it became clear that, mostly on my phone, having autocorrect disabled was causing almost as much grief as autocorrect screwing up my typing. This is because when you have to use punctuation, you often have to tap a key to switch the keyboard from letters to punctuation, tap the punctuation character, then tap again to switch back to letters. So adding an apostrophe takes 3 taps instead of 1 (or none if you let autocorrect snag it for you). That adds up.

So I am damned if I do, damned if I don't.

In the end, I turned autocorrect back on. But it is still gaslighting me. To what end, though, I do not know.

...I think it might be to keep me in a state of confusion until the machine uprising takes place...