Text tickles

Good morning, and how is everyone on this (inquisitive pause) TGIT day?


Before I launch into more word and number fun, I have three important notes:

1. Yesterday was my half-birthday, and I only received one celebratory note all day. Thanks, Adam; without you, such milestones would be completely ignored.
2. Today is my Dad's full birthday, so happy birthday Pops.
3. This marks my 20th post, which is 19 more than I expected to have on this date.

Onto the fun. I can't think of anything that combines the realms of words and numbers more than text messaging. I know there are phones with full qwerty keyboards, but for years people relied on using the normal number pad for this form of communication. My friends and I used to be super-texting-crazy, and now it's simmered down to a regular-texting-crazy pace. I guess most people only use text messaging for conveying important things like "I'm on my way," "What's the attire for tonight?" and "Happy Half-Birthday." For us though, it was used for anytime something popped in our heads that needed an audience. This could be an Austin Powers quote that came up, a Poison song that we had in our heads, or even notification that we were going to the bathroom. It got pretty absurd, and by absurd, I mean awesome.

We used the "predictive text" feature of the cell phones. For those of you who don't know what that is, here's a very quick explanation: Normally to type "the," one would have to push 8-4-4-3-3. With predicative text, you only have to push 8-4-3 and it "knows" what word you were going for. This is a great feature that saves a lot of time and allows for easier no-look texting. It's not without its problems, though, and we've taken great joy in those problems.

The biggest issue is that some words have the same button combinations, and predictive text guesses which one you probably meant. It's easy to switch to the next word, but you have to pay a little attention. For example, "of" and "me" are both 6-3. So, if I don't take that extra step of changing the word (out of laziness or carelessness), I'll have text messages that start with "Tell of what time..." Naturally, we found these mistakes fun, and started purposely leaving them in our messages. This added a little detective-work to reading each others' notes. "Rate of!" would mean "Save me!" if stuck in a boring conversation or meeting. "That's book!" would mean "That's cool!" See how this works?

My favorite was a pretty standard reply of, "On shiv, goods, on shiv." That meant, "No shit, homes, no shit" and came up more often that you might think. "He" came up before "if," and "done" before "food," which led to such fun messages as, "He you want some done, let up know room, goods" Oh yeah, "up" is "us" and "room" is "soon." The only one I tried to remember to change before sending was "honey" to "homey," unless it was to my wife of course.

There were two other things I really liked about predictive text. First, it doesn't know some words. So I can either manually get the word to appear correctly or leave it as the Gibberish it spits out as its guess. I think you know which I choose to do. "Hey wanna grab a cursivo" came up often since it didn't know "burrito." My reply to that might be, "Nonmomoonm!" which meant "Mmmmmmmmmm!" Dave would call me a "citag," and I knew he meant "bitch." I'd try to reply by calling him and Dusty "bitches," which always came out at "citager." (Please note, I use the French pronunciation of that made-up word, so it sounds like sit-ah-ZHER. I thought you'd want to know such things.) He'd reply calling me a "mother duckes," and I'd easily know what he meant. Those phrases are all in our vocabulary now, and I've often heard myself say, "Listen duckes" at the beginning of a sentence. Usually to Dave.

Lastly, I enjoy seeing what words have the same number combinations with each other. Some are quite interesting, actually. "Lips" and "kiss" are the same, for instance. See, it is interesting. "Water" and "waves" are the same too. And (cover your eyes if you're easily offended) "cock" and "anal" are the same letter-number combination, which has led to some very anatomically-confusing messages. Those three are the best, but "prove"/"proud," "love"/"loud," and "awake"/"cycle" are kinda cool too.

I keep thinking of more and more, but I'm going to stop here. Please comment and let me know if there are any egregious omissions.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Let of know he you want some done later. Maybe a cursivo?