There is a reason where I got my first mobile phone in 2002, when it was first introduced into the Nigerian market by the Obasanjo regime. None of those reasons includes a will to censor myself in the type and range of words that I use in my everyday communication with my friends, relatives and whomever else I choose. I am amazed these days however to find out that my phone - and every one else’s for that matter - has been programmed to tell me what and how to write my texts.

No, it is not called “censorship” now. It is called “T9″.

According to Wikipedia, T9, which stands for Text on 9 keys, is a patented predictive text technology for mobile phones, developed by Tegic Communications, recently acquired by Nuance Communications. It is used on phones from LG, Samsung Electronics, Nokia, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Sanyo, Sagem and others. It was said to have also been used by Texas Instruments PDA Avigo during the late 90s. Its main competitors are iTap, created by Motorola, Zi’s eZiText, and SureType, created by RIM.

What T9 does, in short, is to help speed up the time used in sending text messages by reducing the number of keystrikes that the user uses in typing one word. Wikipedia explains more.

“T9’s objective is to make it easier to type text messages. It allows words to be entered by a single keypress for each letter, as opposed to the multi-tap approach used in the older generation of mobile phones in which several letters are associated with each key, and selecting one letter often requires multiple keypresses.

It combines the groups of letters on each phone key with a fast-access dictionary of words. It looks up in the dictionary all words corresponding to the sequence of keypresses and orders them by frequency of use.”

Such that a word like “phone” is typed with five simple keystrokes, equivalent to the corresponding to the numbers “74663″. In the event of two words matching the combination, the user is allowed to choose which word s/he really meant to type. In all, it saves a lot of time and hassle that one ordinarily encounters using the otherwise cumbersome multitapping which we were all initially used to.

All good. So what seems to be the problem?

Now, try to enter the following words on your phone, and you meet a wall: albino, bastard, bitch, darkie, clitoris, fag, coitus, fuck, honky, nigger, penis, phallic, shit, whitey, dick, sissy, whore, wop, and a lot more that you would find if you went on a deliberate search—even the word “faggot” whose second meaning is anything but dirty!

As much as I might agree that many of those words are not pleasant, I do not agree that my phone should restrict me to what I can type in a software that is meant to ease communication.

Now, if I want to type the f-word to the criminal jerk who dares to send me a spam text informing me that I have won a bogus sum of money, the 3825 combination into the compose menu will stonewall, and suggest as replacement “dual”, then “duck”, in that order, then “eval”, and lastly “dubl”. It’s really that bad.

Well, shiv happens! Don’t correct that spelling now. It’s how my phone asks me now to write.