Go Fashion: Text is Book

BY Mel Campbell

The Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction “is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch.” This watch is more Harold’s oddball personal assistant than a timepiece. It enjoys moments of everyday exhilaration, keeps its own counsel on Crick’s love interests, and, ultimately, decides whether he lives or dies.

While mobile phones don’t have quite such portentous influence, they organise our lives as well as our conversations – if you break or lose them, you’ve also lost your watch, alarm, diary and address book. But, more intriguingly, they’re changing our relationship with words, 25c at a time. I’m talking, of course, about predictive text messaging.

The most common predictive system (used on most Nokias and Sony Ericssons) is AOL’s T9, in which you scroll through a list of alternative words and add new ones to the dictionary, letter by letter. Motorola’s competing iTap system speculatively finishes words for you based on what you’ve typed so far, and adds your corrections to the dictionary using the arrow buttons.

Both systems get it wrong a lot of the time.

When you text, you enter a strange and anarchic world in which inviting your friend down the pub for a ‘pint’ could end in a ‘riot’. Other times, your phone retools your name and those of your friends, as if sharing its private nicknames. A friend of mine, a Perth native, is subject to deplorable textual bullying – his phone believes his name and that of his home town are best typed as ‘retard’ and ‘septic’, respectively. And in Predictive Land, mangoes are not only a completely unknown foodstuff, but my phone also adds that anyone who enjoys them is a male prostitute, a ‘manho’. I’m yet to follow its example and accuse my mango-loving homeboys of anything fruity, though.

That’s the question – do you start using the phone’s language or insist yours is better? Although one of my favourite words is ‘beer’ (closely followed by ‘parma’), the damn phone invariably inflicts upon me its own liking for maths – it insists on ‘adds’ every time. It’s also a literature nazi, because ‘book’ is ‘cool’. I mean, I like reading, but I’d rather not have its desirability hammered into my brain the way it is in my phone.

But sometimes the phone’s onto something. Like a bogan parent, I am not a little proud of teaching mine to swear. Now it writes ‘shit’, ‘cunt’ and ‘motherfucker’ with the best of them. Yet I think the phone’s preferred insult, ‘shivhead’, has a certain, ahem, ring to it. And while I enjoy laying the smackdown on someone’s candy ass, there’s something both delicious and streetwise about the phone’s suggestion of a mighty ‘snackenyo’.

And I wish I had the flirtatious boldness of my phone, which replaces ‘lips’ with ‘kiss’; ‘dirty’ with ‘fisty’. Your innocuous text, “Are you home tonite?” turns into a lascivious booty call – “Are you good tongue?” If I said that in person, I’d get strange looks indeed. This way, I can claim, “It wasn’t me – it was the phone!” and get some sweet action too. Time to head good now… See you room!