I’ve just realised there’s another function of the text autosuggest/correct on my iPad.
It’s very useful for adding in apostrophes in words such as don’t. It’s great for capitalising I. It’s very handy that it remembers words like Paleokastrita after the second or third time you use them in a document. It’s not bad at all at spotting real spelling mistakes, except that I never look at the correction in time and it gives me the wrong one. It’s bloody infuriating when you’ve carefully typed a specific word and it changes it. We all know those.
No, the new function is a cliché spotter. I was busy typing the title of this piece and had got as far as the space after “doing” when it suggested the whole next word “nothing” before I’d typed a single letter. This clearly indicates that the sooner it gives you the word you were going to type, the more likely it is that you were going to type a cliché.
Rain was forecast for today and the indoor part of the breakfast restaurant was full, but that was fine with us. We like outdoors. The wind blew and autumn leaves swirled on the ground, green, brown and gold mixed prettily with fallen purple petals. After breakfast we sat around at the hotel. I caught up with the blog, which was running a couple of days behind. (I realise that writing in the blog about writing the blog is getting a bit meta, but this is Greece. This is where they invented meta.)
We decided that the threat of rain had eased and walked through town to the market for a second visit to the little cafe there. The waiter shook our hands like long lost friends [cliché alert] and cleared a table under the canopy for us. He brought us some taramasalata and pickled peppers, a shrimp dish and some whitebait. Delicious.
As we paid the bill, the heavens opened [cliché alert] so we sat a while waiting for it to stop, watching tables and chairs being brought under cover, before wandering back to the hotel, where we stayed until supper, reading and writing some more. Then we went to the nearest restaurant for dinner, maybe fifty yards away, a nice Italian place where dinner was enlivened by an argument in the kitchen. It sounded great – wish we could have understood it.
Our first week was fairly full of walking places and seeing things and doing stuff, and if we’d had just a week we’d have felt it was a good holiday. With another few days to go, we are getting heavily into doing nothing…