Some of life's experiences lack decent words to describe them. Douglas Adams tried to address this problem with his book The Meaning of Liff, in which he appropriated place names to fill gaps in our vocabulary.

Today I decided to plug another gaping chasm of modern language. It describes a phenomenon common to anyone who uses a mobile phone to send text messages. Sometimes you can use predictive text to form words, but not always. For unusual words or if you are using a phone without predictive text features, you need to use a system which some call multi-tap.

With multi-tap, it is not easy to enter two characters that occupy the same number on the keypad. If you want to enter "cat", for example, you have to pause after the C until the phone registers the letter before pressing the key again to enter the A. If you do not pause, the letters just cycle round the option.

Picture used under Creative Commons license.