&%^$# Phone

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in the future. Isn’t it amazing that we can dictate into our phones and our computers and words appear on a screen in front of us? They aren’t always the words we said but they are words nonetheless. When the wrong words appear I view these as teachable moments and great opportunities to learn about the new words. My phone is better now, but when I first got it, it was often crediting me with having a filthy mouth. I would dictate an innocent message of beautiful prose, and ugly swear words would appear on the screen. The more corrections I would make, the worse it would get. Well, I have never and will never intentionally dictate any swear words. My best guess is that somebody with a thumbprint similar to mine cusses a lot. Or maybe someone with a similar voice cusses a lot? I’ve been told I sound like Donald Trump.  

The cool solution would be to have the phone do like the Beetle Bailey comic strip, and when somebody cusses, print out “$%*^!” instead of the cuss word. (When we were kids we’d try to figure out which cuss words were used in the comics by counting the symbols. I could never quite break the code.) Sure, that Sergeant Snorkel’s got a filthy mouth, but I’m gonna let that slide, ‘cause he’s served our country a long, long time.