For language lovers, it can be thrilling to find a name for something you’ve often observed but never been able to label—and the so-called Cupertino effect is a prime contemporary example. It describes one of the most unlikely gifts of the age of word processing: the way in which an overzealous automatic spellchecker can “correct” your attempt at typing one word into something similar yet crucially different.
The term itself is taken from the Northern Californian city of Cupertino—home to no less a company than Apple—thanks to the omission of the word cooperation (when spelled without a hyphen dividing co- and -operation) from the dictionaries of some early spellchecker programs.
This meant that, whenever cooperation appeared in a text, it would be flagged as incorrect. More significantly, for those users who had set their word processors automatically to adjust their typing into “correct” spellings, the word would be changed to Cupertino: the name of the city no doubt featuring in the software’s dictionary thanks to its illustrious corporate residents.
Search for the word Cupertino online, even today, and you’ll soon unearth such delights as “reinforcing bilateral and multinational Cupertino” from official documents created in the early 1990s; or attempts to develop “quality education by encouraging Cupertino between Member States”—this last one courtesy of a European Parliament working paper on languages.28 Indeed, it’s probably EU translators that gave us the term in the first place.
Needless to say, the wired world also abounds with broader examples of the genre. One of my favorites has always been the fondness of an early word processor for turning Freud into fraud. Even today, technology is no guard against error if left unchecked. Witness this correction from the New York Times in April 2012, as highlighted by lexicographer, language commentator, and Cupertino connoisseur Ben Zimmer under the title “Tasty Cupertinos” on the Language Log blog: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Ethiopian dish doro wot as door wot. Additionally, the article referred incorrectly to awaze tibs as aware ties.”
Computer spellchecking hasn’t stood still, and considerable research has been poured into making it smarter and more sensitive to context. Fortunately for Cupertino connoisseurs, however, the modern proliferation of devices on which people type has brought with it a whole new spectrum of spellchecked error. Some of the most pleasing are collected on sites like cupertinoeffect.tumblr.com, which bills itself as “The running log of what I type into my iPhone and what the Apple Computer Corporation of Cupertino, CA, knows I want to say.”
Favorites here include “Yankee fandom” converted into “tanker random,” “gangbang” to “handheld,” “yogi” to “tofu,” and “yessir” into “yessiree.” Humans being what they are, it can be difficult not to read such corrections as an oblique creative force in its own right—and, sometimes, an ironical commentary on what you’re trying to say. Until it learns the word, for example, some phones can transform the company Facebook into “ravenous”—surely a subliminal hint against the consuming tendencies of social media.
Cupertinos can also be a serious business. Consider the case in 2012 of a school in the state of Georgia that was evacuated after a text message reading “gunman be at west hall today” was reported to police. The message, it transpired, had been supposed to read “gonna be at west hall today,” but had been automatically “corrected” without the sender noticing.29