It all started when I went to make a snappy reply to a text that a friend sent me. I meant to tap in ‘Damn slippy!’ but the predictive texting on my Sony Ericsson didn’t want to know about the word ‘damn’. It offered me:

Hmm. The dictionary is highly patchy but ‘damn’ seems like it should be covered. So obviously the word ‘bugger’ wouldn’t make it…. but what’s this?

‘Bugger’ is OK but ‘damn’ is not. Interesting. Well this of course prompted me to launch exploratory mission of finding out what my phone would and would not accept as proper. All the really rude words don’t appear, but the most perplexing thing I discovered is that the word ‘vagina’ is acceptable:

… but that ‘penis’ is not:

I wonder if I could get big money from Sony Ericsson for sexual discrimination?

I leave you with this thought: a person made the decision about what kinds of words the phone’s inbuilt dictionary would include…