T9 is the way poor folks enter text on a phone. And in general it’s a pretty ingenious way of turning a 10-digit keypad into a keyboard. But it disappoints.
There was a time when I texted a lot. When walking through Spain, for example, with nothing but my Nokia 6600 and a pay-as-you-go SIM card from Telefonica. I composed all sorts of short messages to friends and family. I felt like a Japanese schoolgirl, I texted so much. And periodically I wanted to express what I was experiencing in colorful language. Colorful language where lots of words had four letters.
But, try to type in any dirty word using Nokia T9, and you’ll find out it doesn’t exist. All kinds of neat words come up in their place, though: like chuci, daggou, indeco and coalstakes. The only reasonable substitution that comes up when I try out George Carlin’s Infamous Seven is ‘aunt’, which I can believe occurs more frequently (at least in print literature) than the word in Mr. Carlin’s collection. All the rest is just Nokia washing my mouth out with soap. Come on–’shiv’?
Okay, so Nokia gives us the option to include whatever words we want in the phone’s user-customized dictionary. So if I’m tired of calling my boss a ‘ducking casuase’, I can put my own vocabulary words into the phone. That works great with the long words. But it doesn’t work so great for short words, because the default is to use the user’s dictionary word first in any substitution context. So if I tire of mistyping ‘we won, we kicked app’ and I add the appropriate word to my dictionary, and then the next day I send a quick note to Facebook’s product manager congratulating her on her new app, I’m likely to get a pretty colorful response back. There is no perfect solution except for Nokia to give us our econ cupswords back.