A dear friend wrote to me about her son-in-law's fiftieth birthday celebrations.
We're having a kisses nah, she said, and all the family will be there.
Well, this friend is a very cultured and intellectually curious person, and I did wonder what a kisses nah might be. But then my friend is also rather fond of using family slang and playful abbreviations, and so, as I'd got the gist of what she was saying, I thought I'd wait until the actual day of the celebration and hope that all would become clear.
Except that it didn't. We had a brilliant kisses nah, my friend told me, happily. So I went off to consult Google; which, I'm afraid, proved to be exactly as ignorant as me.
I then did the sensible thing and asked my friend what a kisses nah was; and it turned out that kisses nah was an example of the Cupertino Effect - a predictive text error.
And what for?
Well, you now have all the clues, so see if you can work it out .(Answer below).
Word To Use Today: kiss. It strikes me that kissing is rather odd behaviour, but we have been kissing in England for a long time. The Old English form of the word was cyssan.
And the answer?
Kisses nah is what the predictive text system on an iPhone made of an accurate attempt to type birthday lunch.
And I don't think that even Alan Turing could have worked out that one.
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