Down with autocratic Anglo autocorrects!

The horror! The horror! – As the great Joseph Comrade, sorry, Conrad, made a character in his 1899 novella, The Heart of Darkness, utter. But instead of existential dread lurking along the Congo River, the modern-day horror is the autocorrect. The message or document, its autocorrect activated, makes a mockery of names if they aren’t anglophonic enough on the lines of John or Jane.

And riding this culturally hegemonic ‘bug’ comes the standard sender’s excuse, ‘Sorry, it wasn’t me, it was autocorrect!’ No can do with this defence any more, bruv. In Britain, the ‘I am not a typo’ campaign wants, nay, demands that technology becomes more inclusive, more aware of names beyond the ‘Enid Blyton’ nomenklatura. And, no, Vivekananda is neither ‘Vivekamunand’ nor ‘vindaloo’.

All names are created equal, but software doesn’t treat them equally, the bias of coders showing. Even non-anglophones tend to buckle under this ‘correctional’ tyranny. Sita becomes ‘sitar’, Vaclav becomes ‘valve’. The campaign’s research found that almost 5,500 names given to persons in England and Wales in 2021 alone received the wavy red line treatment courtesy of Microsoft‘s UK English dictionary.

So, non-anglophonic name-holders of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your misnomers. Or, send protest emails to Microsoft’s Saturday Nutella and Meta‘s Mark Zookeeper.