Help me Snopes myself!

by Doctor Science

In his July Wired article about the history of autocorrect, Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:

A commenter on the Language Log blog recently mentioned hearing of an entire dialect in Asia based on phone cupertinos, where teens used the first suggestion from autocomplete instead of their chosen word, thus creating a slang that others couldn’t decode. (It’s similar to the Anglophone teenagers who, in a previous texting era, claimed to have replaced the term of approval cool with that of book because of happenstance T9 input priority.)

A few days ago, Anna North of the NY Times asked Will the New Autocorrect Steal Your Soul? (spoilers: no.), and quoted the above paragraph from Lewis-Kraus’ article as suggesting that “Autocorrect errors may even birth new languages”.

As it happens, I was that Language Log commenter. Ben Zimmer of Language Log contacted me to let me know about these articles, and to see if I had anything to add.

My first reaction was hilarity. You see, when Lewis-Kraus says “recently mentioned”, he means, um, August 2010. The comment was on the post Cell Phone Cupertinos by Mark Liberman:

I’m pretty sure I saw something several years ago about a whole dialect (argot? jargon? slang?) that had developed among young people in Japan (or possibly some other Asian country), based on phone cupertinos. Basically, they used the first suggestion from the autocomplete function *instead* of the original target word, to create an argot that was reasonably opaque to outsiders.

Now, 2010 is more than a generation ago, in Internet years. And I was recalling something I thought I’d seen several years ago at the time, so we’re probably looking back to 2008 or earlier.

It’s clearly a good story — not only was it picked up at Wired and the NY Times, but when I discussed this at supper last night my family knew what I was talking about, because it’s been mentioned in conversation around here. But at this point I honestly have no idea whether it’s true, or something my mind put together and told me was true.

I remember making the comment at Language Log, enough to have talked about it to my family over the years. I remember trying to find a link while writing the comment, and gave up when I couldn’t come up with one quickly. I have a mental image of the screen where I read it, and a sense that there was an image of people sitting on a train or subway, each looking at their phone — but that illustration might have just been provided by my brain, I don’t know. The text might have been about Korea instead of Japan, and I have the persistent feeling it was from the NY Times, even though I’m pretty sure now that it wasn’t.

I’ve been googling and googling, looking for things pre-August 20, 2010 that might be what I was talking about, and coming up blank. Or, rather, coming up tangled and confused.

Was I talking about how Japanese girls used pager codes? That article was less than two weeks before the LL post, so it’s definitely not what I was thinking of — but it’s quite likely that if I was actually remembering anything real, Mizuko Ito was being quoted, so I’m writing to her after I post this.

Did I mash that together with how the Chinese use puns to get around internet censorship? I would have heard about that on Language Log, even if I didn’t see the NY Times article.

And did I then mix that up with English-language T9 predictive-text slang? And the pervasiveness of cell-phone culture in South Korea?

Or was I thinking of gyaru moji? This is an Japanese girls’ style similar to l33t, but with extra complexity to exploit the many character sets available on Japanese cell phones. Gyaru moji seems to have fallen out of favor since around 2008, probably since it was slower than standard writing — though I suspect emoji are being used to fill the gap — the need for communication that is opaque to adult eyes, and also the desire for communication that is nice-looking and pretty.

And yet, I have no sense that I’d heard of gyaru moji before I dragged it out of the search engine just now! Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? Did I make something up, not realize it was fiction, then spread it as fact? Or was I actually talking vaguely about something I had truly heard elsewhere?