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What is it?
Auto-correct creates malapropisms that can be quite humorous. Jewish tech-users often transliterate from Hebrew and Yiddish to English. This leads to particularly comic auto-correct errors. Some classic examples:
Nachas to Nachos / Rabbi to Rabbit / Pesach to Peas have (Ashkenazim beware!) / Shavua tov to Sharia tov
The comedic potential of inserting these into texts, emails, and sensitive social contexts might make Shakespeare’s Dogberry or All in the Family‘s Archie Bunker blush. A pedestrian example: “At the brisket, my rabbit wished my bubble lots of nachos.”
Why does it matter?
Correction is a religious ideal. We term sin’s correction teshuva. That our computers and cellphones correct our errors might make us more careless in how we communicate. In a technology-enabled rush-to-rush, we might lose some of our self-correcting habits. Might auto-correct’s heinous sins against those who regularly transliterate slow their communication long enough to preserve some self-correcting muscles?
Aharon Lichtenstein wrote of a different auto-correct – rote-repentance:
Just as there can be prayer of keva (fixed-task), so too there can be teshuva of keva. “It is like a heavy burden upon him.” Yom ha-kippurim rolls around and – what can you do? – it’s time for teshuva. It says so in the books. You heard it as a child, you heard it when you were maturing as an adolescent, you heard it when you became an adult, and you have to do teshuva (Return and Renewal, 134).
The risks of rote religious performance long predate auto-correct. Yet, the shortening of attention spans with the ever-expanding role of technology impedes the deep thinking required for real teshuva. Can the unending current of entertaining and not-so-entertaining content allow for imploring, searching, and weeping?
What questions remain?
Technology can now report on weekly screen time. What other tools might technology make available for introspection and reflection? Might technology provide a “lashon ha-ra score” mined from within our texts and e-mails?
Chaim Strauchler, rabbi of Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, is an Associate Editor of TRADITION.
1 Comment
R. Nachum Amsel reports: Rabbi Berel Wein, who cannot see for many years now, has to dictate everything, including 6 books put out from memory in the last 6 years. He quips that his computer/auto correct is antisemitic. Every time he says the words “Jewish prophet”, it always spells out and writes “Jewish profit.”