break your chains, turn off autocorrect

as we progress further into this catastrophic dissolution of personal identity known as modernity (oh yeah, we breaking out the big words so you take me seriously), autocorrect stands at the forefront of toxic sameness. as lossy of a conversion from vocal communication to written may be, there is so much opportunity to use the medium of text to express our being that does not fit within the confines of proper language!!! those that grew alongside the internet and its various chat rooms know already of the many quirks they can use to flavor their text, but hopefully this rambling will help convince new friends why the unrestricted language of the old web was so powerful. at the very least, maybe this will convince you to turn off the godforsaken option on most devices to autoconvert text emoticons to the hellspawn that is emoji ...

emoji

~ but wait!! whats wrong with emoji?!?!?!? theyre a way for people to express themselves in ways that proper english doesnt allow !!!

yeah sure, emoji are ok. they allow you to express some 200 set emotions or send a cool picture of a vegetable that anyone of any language can understand. theres some creative people that make use of chaining multiple emojis together to create new compound emotions but even then, much of the time i find myself looking through the list of emojis not quite finding one to express myself properly.

BUT THATS NOT THE POINT!

why are we deciding to choose premade emotions when expressing ourselves!!! screw you and your plastic smiles and corporate funded tears, i want to see you as you. wow, you have 3 different ways to show that you are experiencing joy right now. so extensiveee... this is like a hellscape where humanity has a singular form! one face, one standardized voice, muscles that can only contort to how the machine's design permits! i dont care about readability and accessibility if it turns everone on the internet into a husk of their being D:< !!!

for just expressing joy, heres what they keep from you: c:, (:, C:, [:, ^^, 'v', :D, =J, ), OuO, and of course our beloved :3. this isnt even some kind of comprehensive list, there are thousands of ways to just make a happy expression using the medium of unicode. dont forget about all the permutations of these little faces that allow you to inject details to bloat them as full of charater as you want. just heard a good joke, but a XD feels like its overexpressing? mute it a bit by decapitalizing, xd still gets the idea across as the universal "ecks dee" emoji but with a much less exaggerated feel. ^^ doesnt pass off your immensely pure heart?? slAP on a flower and woag, ^^*, its adorable. mocking someone in an online lobby but a :) doesnt quite portay how happy their tears make you? youve come prepared with a :)))))))), now THATS an emotion.

language seeps into emoji use as well. a common occurrence i noticed whenever i accidentally joined a portuguese chatroom (i have "no br"-ed many times in my life) is that the tilde ~ is used in many emoticons (most notably ~:u, a favorite of mine). the standard american keyboard layout includes this key, but the tilde is basically never used in our language, so it makes sense that it sees infrequent use in the design of our emoticons. (tirade: the english language SUCKS for good emoji designs with our lack of accents and "floating characters" è-é). enough about emojis though, if you want you can go ahead and watch this excellent video about emoticons instead.

accents (nõt thésë ônès)

that brings me to another thing i miss, cultural identity through text. im not too sure how relevant for the non-english speaking crowd (im only speaking from personal experience here after all!), but an interesting thing that happens when you toss people from all languages into a predominantly english speaking space is that their text becomes flavored with aspects from their own languages. yeah thats right, accents exist through unfiltered text, and youd be surprised at how recognizable some can be. for example, a German speaking Person may capitalize all of their Nouns or someone from japan will tend to not use capitalization whatsoever (i was going to do the the thing where i do the "accent" while typing this out but then i realized i already dont capitalize so it doesnt work... :/).

age can sometimes come off in text as well if you keep an eye out on punctuation, i notice that older folks tend to put a space before and after their punctuation when they arent using autocorrect on their phones . it bothers me horribly , but i guess when they learned traditional english they didnt really have to think if there is a space before or after the period ... anyone thats talked to me online has definitely noticed myself picking up this """dialect""" and using "..." as its very own word in my messages. its so useful when navigating through awkward situations ....... really lets that ... dead silence come through ...... and it even has the wonderful trait of flexibility that you get when you dont limit yourself to Proper English. the combination of boomer spacing and an "improper" amount of ellipses really makes it seem like i have no idea what im doing ....

skill issues

im bad at speaking in general and will often stumble across my words/give up on a sentence halfway if i dont care about it enough. it doesnt really affect my day to day life (i chose to work with computers so i dont have to speak to anyone after all), but people will sometimes catch on to it and attribute that kind of speaking to me as a person if they notice someone else being as incapable at speech as i. we have our own ways of differentiating speech patterns irl, and it just generally makes people more interesting to talk to in my opinion. just imagine how terrible it would be if every single person you talked to had the same generic voice with perfect speech, slang would go extinct immediately... english as a language kind of relies on people doing things wrong to create interesting synonyms/figures of speech, beeing loose with your language just leads to increases in laguage variety. the loose flow of english shouldnt apply to vocal performances only, some of my friends' favorite memes/sayings come from one of us being incapable of typing (words like "gahugis", "definitively", "lapcdanve"). hell, if you journey through a discord server's "quotes" channel, im willing to bet over 25% of the quotes come from someone making some silly typo. turn on autocorrect and you only end up with posts worthy of "DamnYouAutocorrect.com" (aka go straight to unfunny jail ^_^).

non skill issues

the only potential downside that i can think of from turning off your autocorrect would be accessibility reasons, i can see how people going wild with their english could be difficult to read... if you do turn off your autocorrect its important to at least do people the courtesy of making your posts legible. i could cast off my shackles of punctuation and capitalism and stick to pure lowercase alphanumerics, but like, that just sucks to read. do better. bend the rules of english but dont just flat out disregard them, they were implemented for a reason.

i like to imagine that even with my minimalistic grammar choices, my posts are still perfectly readable (if theyre not please let me know). id say castrating your emotions from your messages reduces accesibility as well. tone tags are great, and i do use them when necessary, but they often are necessary because of tone dead writing that autocorrect introduces!! im really bad with misunderstanding texts from irl friends and thinking they hate me for some reason because everything they write ends up being a Super Serious, Fully Punctual Sentence. i dont get this when writing online friends, which could just be because they also know how to properly communicate online, but for narrative reasons i WILL be saying its because of their lack of autocorrect!

PLAEASE TURN IT OFF

ok, thats everything i wanted to rant about i think. hopefully you stop using autocorrect so my internet rot brain can have more dopamine from analyzing your funky writing styles. if you already had it off and read this far, uh... thanks :D!!! keep being a cool person on the internet (ASSUMPTION), you are appreciated !!!