I kind of doubt that autocorrect software really changed “meditating” to “masturbating”. Because of stuff like this. Edit: And because, start at the left and working rightward, they only share 1 letter before diverging, and because I’ve seen a spell-checker with special behavior for dirty/curse words (Not suggesting them as corrected spellings, but also not complaining about them as unrecognized words) (this is the one spell-checker which, out of curiousity, I decided to check its behavior with dirty/curse words, so I bet it’s common). Edit 2: Also from a causal history perspective of why a doubt it, rather than a normative justification perspective, there’s the fact that Yvain linked it and said something like “I don’t care if these are real.” Edit 3: typo.
I kind of doubt that autocorrect software really changed “meditating” to “masturbating”. Because of stuff like this. Edit: And because, start at the left and working rightward, they only share 1 letter before diverging, and because I’ve seen a spell-checker with special behavior for dirty/curse words (Not suggesting them as corrected spellings, but also not complaining about them as unrecognized words) (this is the one spell-checker which, out of curiousity, I decided to check its behavior with dirty/curse words, so I bet it’s common). Edit 2: Also from a causal history perspective of why a doubt it, rather than a normative justification perspective, there’s the fact that Yvain linked it and said something like “I don’t care if these are real.” Edit 3: typo.
To be fair, that is a fairly representative example of bad autocorrects. (I once had a text message autocorrect to “We are terrorist.”)