For Folklore Friday, we’re going to look at one of my favorites: Titivillus, the patron demon of autocorrect.
Sorry, I meant scribes and printers.
Back in the early days of yore, as in the medieval era, books were few and libraries scarce. Manuscripts were copied by hand by studious monks and shared between monasteries. (Unless you were rich.) But copying books by hand was a tedious endeavor and prone to human error.
Or demon influence.
Enter, Titivillus.
Titivillus was a demon who loved to hang out in monasteries. Whenever a careless monk made an error in their manuscript, Titivillus would collect the erroneous letters and put them in his giant sack. Kind of like an evil opposite of Santa.
Then, when he could fill the sack a thousand times, he returned to Hell and stored the errors until Judgment Day. Every mistake collected would count against you, and you might end up in the Bad Place.
I don’t know how many points each grammatical error counted for. Someone check the point system.
Anyway, eventually, monks grew more studious in their copying, and it took longer and longer for Titivillus to fill his sack. He tried and tried and tried to get those monks to make errors, but alas, his plans were foiled.
Running low on grammatical errors to both insert and collect, he took to hanging around churches during Mass. He would gather loose gossip from the pews and erroneously sung syllables from the choir loft.
“Hello, you’ve been assigned to the Bad Place for singing off key in church.”
Dammit.
Cue the printing press. Titivillus is back in business with sloppy publishers.
Fun fact: The Oxford English Dictionary contained an error that went unnoticed for 50 years. The footnote on the entry for Titivillus referenced the wrong page number.
Anyway, his name derives from the goddess, Tutilina. She was a minor Roman goddess of agriculture who protected grain after it was collected and stored. She chased away mice from your silo.
Tutilina=helpful.
Titivillus= a ducking anthole.
God dammit, Titivillus, stop it!
Between the fall of the Roman gods and the year 1240, when Titivillus is first identified, a variety of grammatical mistakes occurred which led to Tutilina’s name ending up in the masculine form as “Titivillus.”
There’re also several ways to spell it. I assume from centuries of him inserting grammatical errors into the written word.
Jumping to the modern era, Titivillus has taken up residency in autocorrect, and he makes you say things you didn’t Nintendo.
What the duck! Titivillus, get out of my keyboard! Give me back my F, you little afnlakfal”LSKvnvlKN;lkv’lKjhfyfjDFlskjg.
Okay. Duck that guy.
No one ever means to say ‘duck.’
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