When I first discovered the joys of SMS about a decade ago, I fell in love with it, so much so that I desired a mobile connection just to send SMS-es. Making and receiving calls were passé. It was the speed of punching a reply to SMS, it was the cool new short-forms, that became the fever. I would choose to send a message to convey info that could be said in a less-than-three-seconds’ call, even if it takes me more time to type it.

In my initial days of text messaging, I excelled in typing speed and shortening of words to make coherent short messages. My sister, on the other hand, made perfectly formed sentences complete with zero grammatical and spelling errors. And yet, her speed matched or exceeded mine. Atrocious!

Once I paused in my brisk texting to complain to her that her messages seemed quite formal, not quite she-ish, and she let me in to her secret – the T9 Editor.

I refused to be enchanted by the so-called ‘intelligent’ dictionary squirming through words on each key-press and raising numerous possible permutations and combinations to locate the one best suited to the occasion. It just wasn’t me.

Today, several revolutions and rotations of the World later, I am an ardent admirer of the T9. Except when I have to key-in words in the regional/national language, my default setting is T9. And my sister? She has long ago bid farewell to the T9 and along with it, vowels seem to have totally abandoned her text message composer.

I often wonder, seeing the suggestions that my T9 gives me for the same key combination, on what basis was the order of the words decided? Most-often-used first? Probably. Sometimes, I suspect that the person who designed it was/is an optimist, a romantic, an adventurer, who gave certain words a tad advantage over others. Given two words which could be equally popular, see the ones he has given preference to!

Read on…

* ‘Cool’ before ‘Book’ or ‘Cook’
* ‘Moon’ before ‘Noon’
* ‘Dec’ before ‘Feb’ Yes, winter is for romantics!
* ‘Slip’ before ‘Skip’
* ‘In’ before ‘Go’
* ‘Pain’ before ‘Rain’ Hmm… that wasn’t very romantic or optimistic, though!
* ‘Won’ before ‘Woo’ and ‘Zoo’
* ‘See’ before ‘Red’
* ‘Find’ before ‘Fine’
* ‘Of’ before ‘Me’
* ‘Foot’ and ‘Font’ before ‘Don’t’
* And the best of them all … ‘Selected’ before ‘Rejected’

Get what I mean?