Mistexting

You're familiar with texting and sexting, but do you know about mistexting--texting with mistakes?


I am an expert, but it's not all my fault. Partly it's due to my 1G "dumb" phone that has no keyboard and forces you to use the numeric keypad. Why haven't I upgraded you may ask? Seems I'm on the family plan and one of my sons (not mentioning any names) always has a crying, urgent need to take the new phone upgrade. So far he's had the Samsung basic, the orange Samsung keyboard phone, a blackberry, a droid and now is considering the i-Phone. Well, he's a busy guy and I can take that extra 30 seconds with a text message because I don't send that many. 


My trusty compact black and silver Samsung, dumb as it is, sports a 'Word' feature, where it will guess what word you've inputted on the numeric keypad and then allow you to hit 0 to see the next guess, if the first one wasn't correct. Kind of like the little engine that could. My phone is trying so hard to climb that mountain and he may jurt make it.


An example: I key in 'cat' and the phone guesses in this order: 'act, cat, bat, abu, cau, cav, acu, bau, activate'. Maybe not what you'd expect, but it usually gets you there in the end. One of my favorites: key in 'just' and you get 'jurt, just, lust, and kurt'. The dumb phone tries, but it also does not learn from its mistakes or alter the choices based on frequency of words you do use. At this point, I almost never change 'jurt' to 'just'--they're synonyms as far as i'm concerned and my kids are used to my messages. "Jurt got back from the shore". Oh, this one must be from Mom.


The other day I got good news in a text and rushed to send back a big YAY. Typing in 'yay' on my phone returns 'wax' and instead of hitting 0 for the next word choice, I mistakenly hit send.  Before I had even realized my error, I got my son's lightning fast reply- a single question mark. (For me to do that I would have had to switch mode from Word to Symbols, click over to the ?, hit enter and then return to Word, but I'm not complaining, jurt saying...)


Back to correcting my 'wax' message: I scrolled through the other word choices: 'way, yaw, waz'. That's it. No 'yay' even listed. So, this is where it gets time consuming. I switch modes from the Word option to ABC and then hit each key the correct number of times for the right letter. So now the simple YAY is keyed in as 9,9,9, for the Y, 2 for the A and 999 for the second Y--7 keystrokes plus I had to change modes. 


Turns out i'm a YAY person and use it frequently. I could switch to the more generic 'Great or Awesome or Cool or You Rock'. I tried 'hurray', but that is also unrecognizable, translated as 'hurraw'.  Hurraw?! 


Then it hit me. Wax. WAX! What an Awesome, Cool, Great, You Rock word!  OK, you've said it in a normal voice and free associate wax with candles, car wax, floor wax, ear wax, birthday cake with wax encrusted frosting....Wrong! Say it out loud and raise your hands over your head. (Don't force me to make a video because, as you already know, my phone stinks and can't do that.) Shout it with enthusiasm: WAX, WAX, WAX! Oh baby, I think I'm onto something here. Feel free to share this with your friends. This is how new slang is born and I'm thinking viral here. Maybe I will need that YouTube clip after all. Could be a video taping session needed over Easter. I'll keep you posted!  


Happy Passover/Easter/Spring to you all!