Friday, January 15, 2010

There needs to be a word!

You know what there needs to be a word for? Just like we have homonyms (words which share the same spelling) and homophones (words which share the same pronunciation), we now need a word for words that share the same keystroke -- like for typing on phones, using T9 or SureType or the like.

It's way too often that I have to explain to someone why my sentences make no sense because my Pearl's SureType guesses "are" instead of "see", and I didn't notice before I hit send! "Bye! Are you later! :D!" D:! And it's this relatively new phenomenon that needs a word other than typo, because it's not a typo at all!

Although... now that I think of it, there also needs to be a word for the irrecognizable word-guesses that result from T9/SureType/whatever trying to make sense of a word that you *did* typo, but which would've been perfectly recognizable (at least given the context) as the intended word had it not been mangled into something completely different (and possibly much longer than the number of keystrokes you actually made). If I miss hitting the OP key once while typing "people", I end up with something like, "Hm, but we don't have enough orole..." or "Yeah, they're a great bunch of proletarian." (??) Fail!

What's a good root-esque morpheme that refers to keys/typing? I keep thinking of "tecla" from Portuguese/Spanish (or chave/clave/llave/chiave), but there must be some variation of the Latin root that's more appropriate for use in this word that needs to exist!

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