I appreciate that this may not be the most important debunking of all time.

The auto-correct on the iPhone really is brilliant, but, as with T9 before it, if you’re in a hurry then one typo can totally alter your message. That is the motivation behind the latest online craze, DamnYouAutocorrect.com.

Damn You Autocorrect has amassed huge publicity and readership by collecting iPhone screengrabs where this autocorrect quirk has turned an innocent message into something disturbing, and it’s my opinion that most of them are fake.

I first started to suspect something was amiss when the following exchange was uploaded:

Your mom and I are going to divorce next month

what??? why! call me please?

I wrote Disney and this phone changed it. We are going to Disney.

I have an iPhone. This doesn’t happen. For one thing, there are seven letters in “divorce” and only six in “Disney”. The autocorrect can add in missed letters, but S is not near V and even further from O. I can’t see any way that you could aim for ‘disney’ and hit something that would correct to ‘divorce’, and nor do I think you would say “Disney” when you mean “Disneyworld”. (Obviously, just like Derren Brown’s lottery prediction show, there are people in the comments section giving all sorts of wrong reasons why the obviously fake thing is fake, including “Disney is in the dictionary”.)

I’m sure it’s possible to type this badly, and the submitter is defending it in the comments, but it’s so unlikely that anyone that incredibly bad at typing would surely read their texts back before hitting ‘send’? I mean, they’d have to, or else the text would say “Tour non and o ate going to divorce newt moth”. And at that point, you’d give up and just phone people.

It made me wonder how much of the rest of the site was fake, and being frighteningly anal, I checked. You probably have a qwerty keyboard in front of you now, so feel free to play along.

The last 16 updates contain the following ‘corrections’ I think are definitely real:

• ORBIS = PENIS. O, R and B are right next to P, E and N (although ORBIS corrects to ORBISON).
• UNOPENED = IMPLANTS. I've tried this and it works.

It also has the following typing errors, where the user simply typed the wrong word, which seem totally plausible but are on the wrong website:

• GRAPES = RAPES.
• LIFE = LICE.

Then there’s one I don’t understand, and a few that seem plausible but unlikely and I’m giving the benefit of the doubt:

• SIT = SHIT.
• ERRANDS = E TRANSSEXUAL. If you add a space after the E, RRANDS could easily be a typo for TRANSS, which is only really the start of TRANSSEXUAL. I can't reproduce it but I'll buy it.
• FUTURE = FÜHRER. The umlaut lends this credibility, because the phone does add that, but I can't make it happen or see how it could.

Then, there’s this lot, which I think are fake:

• WHOLE = WHORE. So, your thumb is hovering over O, and you want to press L, immediately below, but accidentally lunge over the keyboard to hit something nearer R? Not buying it.
• SALAD = SLAVE. SLAAD and SLADD correct to SPASS, and SLALD to SKALD. What did this guy type?
• HERCULES = HERPES. Let's say "HER" and "ES" were typed correctly, but two keypresses between didn't register. The closest letter in "CUL" to P is the L, and HERLES corrects to HEELED.
• HOME TOO = HORNY. I don't know where to begin on this.
• PIE = POO. Hitting O instead of I, sure, but really, you missed the E by enough to overshoot POW, POD or POT?
• COKE = COCK. The words sound alike, but C is nowhere near K is nowhere near E, and COEK corrects to CORK.
• YARD = VAGINA. No, it doesn't.
• LIVING = LICKING. At first I bought this, because C is right next to V. But the scientific method taught me that "LICING" corrects to "LIVING", which is the word they were going for. Unless you hit KI instead of I, which is almost impossible on a touchscreen.

So, excluding the one I don’t understand and the two that could should be on DamnYouQwerty.com, we have 13 entries, of which at least 8 (62%) are probably fake. Even granting them the typos as valid, they’re 53% fake.

And, to be honest, even if the ones I’ve classed as ‘fake’ are real, sneerily blaming them on the tool rather than the staggering, megalithic incompetence of its users is so obnoxious I don’t want to know about it. There are websites full of bad pictures people have drawn, and they’re not called DamnYouPaint. The Daily WTF isn’t called DamnYouCompiler. Anything looks bad when it’s used by a buffoon, and it really annoys me when people criticise someone or something that a lot of work went into because it’s not fucking magic.