Back in the day students like me were encouraged to learn the touch typing method for our typewriters. That meant fingers resting on the home row of ASDF and JKL; with thumbs at the ready on the space bar. It was supposed to be the key to speed and accuracy, and whether you were a student or a secretary, an insurance agent or an HR professional, it was how you produced clean, printed documents.
For the record I was a poor practitioner. I hunt and pecked my way around the keyboard, producing as many errors as correct words. I used every correction method available, from eraser to tape to what had to be gallons of Liquid Paper. My documents looked like they had been in a street fight, except all the cuts and scrapes were white instead of red.
As standalone word processors and then computers elbowed their way into the mainstream, skill at typing became both more and less important. More, because everything moved from handwritten to machine written. Less, because whatever method you used to enter the data was immediately correctable before it got to the page, so accuracy was less important. Whether you were a 75 word-per-minute professional-level typist or used two fingers made no difference to the finished product that people saw, which is all that really mattered.
Of late we have been moving to the next frontier, voice typing. Accurate transcription of spoken speech used to be an expensive and time-consuming proposition. You had to make copies of tapes or files of speeches or conversations, send them to a service, and wait several days to get back the result. But like travel and banking, technology has elbowed its way in, pushing highly skilled and experienced professionals out of the way with a product that offers high efficiency with little or no cost.
I've been trying to learn to leverage that application, certainly for first drafts. Rather than bang on a keyboard or make my fat thumbs find the right letters on my phone, I have taken to activating the microphone on the device and trying to assemble my thoughts in coherent enough form to see them appear on the page. I say "first draft," as what comes out of my mouth often makes little or no sense when read back without serious editing. And I mean serious editing.
I also find that when dictating I am less reserved about my choice of words. Credit my mother, but I do try and watch my language in a public setting. Sure, I try and make coherent sentences, but I also use words and phrases not offensive to those with tender ears. That contrasts with when I am talking with those I know, and that includes me. In those instances I am, how shall we say, less restrained.
As such, looking at a dictated version of my thoughts is likely to include several of instances that the brilliant comedian George Carlin singled out this way: "There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are 7 of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be bad. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war."
But I have noticed that not only can you not say them on television, you can't say them in Microsoft Word. If I dictate the word b*******, well you can see what comes up, a "B" and a lot of asterisks. Rifling through Carlin's master list you get f*** and m***********, p*** and c*********. It does seem that context counts. I can dictate "The cock crows at dawn" with no issue, or "I pricked my finger" and it is accurately rendered. But try and use those words in a more colorful way and, well, asterisks for days.
To be clear I can type those words, I just can't say them and have them typed. Seems for all of its advanced capabilities my AI transcriber has the same sensibility as a network censor in the 70's. But tastes, mores and speech patterns are shifting, so perhaps it's just a matter of time until the asterisks clear. In the same vein, in certain quarters these days demo*ra*y is a dirty word. Whoops, looks like the times, they are a'changin'.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to us PG language when he can. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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