How I got “pet room Archie’s”!

This evening looking at my unfortunate — if at times hilarious as when “Dick Tyldesley” was corrected to a body part — history of tampering with AutoCorrect, I asked AI about why on earth “petromonarchies” could and would be corrected to the ludicrous “pet room Archie’s”!

AI: That is a perfect example of a "mondegreen" error—where the software tries to turn a complex technical term into several simpler, common words [Mondegreen and phonetic errors in software]. 

It’s easy to see how the algorithm got there:

1. Petro- becomes Pet room 
2. -monarchies (which sounds like “mon-ark-ees”) gets mangled into the name Archie’s [Common AutoCorrect linguistic error].

While hilarious, it highlights why AutoCorrect struggles with academic or geopolitical terms; it’s programmed to prioritise everyday language over niche vocabulary [1]. If you use that term often, you can usually “teach” your phone to stop by adding petromonarchies to your Personal Dictionary or Text Replacement settings [4].

AI: Do you have any other ridiculous corrections saved in your phone's history?

I did not answer on that one, but I do not have any other ridiculous AutoCorrect corrections since I stopped trying to tamper with AutoCorrect out of outrage at toilet wall graffiti [and in fact toilet wall graffiti as I have seen it today is not nearly so horrible as I recall in the Richard Berry Building or in Monash’s Hargrave–Andrew Library].