It's a standard feature which I have no idea how to turn off.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Pike series and novel continuity
- Thread starter Enterprise1701
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I found the e-mail where Michael and I decided to do it. He seemed to think we were the first, too.
Anyway, I'll be really impressed only if someone mentions Clan Hgrtcha.
I was sure I must've commented on the name's unlikely popularity as a piece of fanon among Millennial and Zoomer fans on Tumblr and AO3 who came to the scene after the 2009 movie or DSC here in TrekLit, but when I Googled it, I just found me mentioning it in the Babylon 5 thread in SF&F. I must not have used the exact name in my reply.
For phones, it's a necessary evil given the smallness and flatness of the keys. It's actually a fairly interesting technical process how the phone makes it look like you're typing on a normal keyboard, but behind the scenes, it's "cheating" to make things easier. For instance, when you type a letter, it predicts based on an internal dictionary which letters you're most likely to type next, and makes the touch-targets for those letters slightly bigger than normal so they're easier to hit (which, I guess, is things coming full circle with the QWERTY keyboard intentionally being designed so letters that normally go together are separated on the keyboard to prevent mechanical jams on typewriters). I remember when I was first learning to type on a smartphone, the trick was to not worry about accuracy, and just sort of mash the keys based on your muscle-memory of a full-sized keyboard, and let autocorrect figure it out. It's actually kind of fun to watch misspelling-ridden gibberish magically transform into exactly what I was trying to type. Though it's gotten a bit worse in recent years, at least on Apple devices, possibly due to some attempts to make the feature "smarter" which backfired. On computers, on the other hand, it's just a useful feature (sometimes) for resolving common errors. Heck, I wrote "teh" more than once while I was drafting this post (and getting it to not fix itself was a bit of a chore just now).
When it comes to intentionally misspelling words, I find it best to write them in all caps, since my computer automatically assumes such a word is meant to be an acronym and won't flag it as misspelled or try to correct it.
Sure, but my phone only suggests words or spellings. It doesn't automatically override my own typing. That's the part I don't understand, the way people's devices apparently make the changes on their own without asking for approval, and even against their users' will.
Granted, Word and my current word processor, LibreOffice, do have autocorrect for a number of common words, and I usually don't mind when it does things like fixing "teh" or something like that. But it's only with common mistypings of select words. It doesn't do things like trying to "correct" character names or alien language into common words. Phone autocorrect seems far more aggressive and intolerant of anything outside its dictionary, and it often seems to me like it does more harm than good.
That sounds like sacrificing control for speed.
I've always been a lousy typist, so it's second nature for me to catch myself, backspace, and fix what I just typed. (I did it half a dozen times in that sentence alone.) I don't mind taking it slow for the sake of getting it right.
I hear that. And it's true of clamshell phones with real keys, too. Some years ago, after buying a tricorne at Colonial Williamsburg, I texted "Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken" to a friend, and it came out utterly unrecognizable.
My point is, if I can set my phone so that it just suggests spellings rather than inserting them automatically, why don't other people do that too? When I hear people complain about autocorrect, it's like they feel they can't do anything to change how it works.
Wow... I'm shocked. In a good way! It's always pleasantly surprising when one of the shows picks up something from the novels!
Just out of curiosity, why don't you like it (if you don't mind me asking)? I'm actually quite happy with both of these. And really relieved they didn't decide to go with "Xtm-cat-walking-on-keyboard" for Spock.
Personally, I'm rather eager to hear how S'Chn T'Gai is supposed to be pronounced. Though part of me suspects they may make an in-joke out of it with everyone seeing the name on Spock's file and attempt to pronounce it, just to be met with his disapproving stares to indicate they pronounced it wrong.
I just think that Spock is such an iconic character that it's a bad idea to change his name after almost 60 years. It's not a dealbreaker for me -- I'm still looking forward to the show -- but I just really don't like the idea of changing his name.
It’s not really “changing” his name, though. It’s adding to it, in the same way that “Nyota” added to Uhura’s name after more than forty years of her never having an officially spoken first name.
This just gives Spock something that distinguishes him in universe from the potentially thousands of other Vulcans named Spock that exist.
Right. And the name was coined in a 1985 book, so it's been around for 37 of the 58 years since Spock was created. Plus it's been canonical since "This Side of Paradise" that Spock has another name, even if we didn't know what it was.
Peter David used exactly that idea in “The Rift” for Number One. “You’re so emotionally distant you won’t even call your first officer by name!” “I don’t call her by name because I can’t pronounce it. Neither can you.”
It turns out that "S'chn T'gai" is actually pronounced "Harold."
So some intern making posters probably just got their full names by Googling and ended up on Memory Beta.
Barbara Hambly's own reaction is pretty excited: https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=394160745857961&id=100057921166307
I love how happy she is!
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