How to fix stray or sneaky iPhone keyboard shortcuts?

This is indeed quite possible and it’s a practical joke that is the result of someone else getting their hands on your daughter’s Apple iPod Touch for a minute or two, perhaps while she was out of the room or similar. I am guessing that “Drake” is a boy that she doesn’t actually like much (based on my experience with two daughters!) and that it’s meant to just drive her batty every time she uses the device.

What’s happening is that it’s the keyboard shortcuts feature that’s looking for occurrences of one character sequence and automatically replacing it with another. On my iPhone, for example, I have it set up so that if I type in “teh” it automatically replaces it with “the”. Quite handy. But set up something more sneaky and it can be maddening!

To fix it, go to Settings then find the “General” option:

Once you’re in that area of settings, look for “Keyboard”:

There are other useful settings on that screen if you want to change the auto-lock, for example, so that her friends don’t get quite as easy access to her device, but that’s just a distraction for this particular issue.

Tap on “Keyboard” and it turns out that there’s a lot to examine:

As you can see, I have all the auto-correct, auto-capitalization and other helpful features enabled, but if you — or your daughter — hates the iPod (iPhone / iPad) autocorrect, here’s exactly where you can disable it and trust the accuracy of your fingers instead. Notice also that you can enable Check Spelling while disabling Auto-Correction. Useful: it’ll show you the words that are misspelled, but won’t fix them automatically.

Let’s stay on task, however. Tap on “Shortcuts” to see what shortcuts are set up.

This is where you’ll find the shortcut that “no” = “I love Drake”.

Look closely at my list and notice that I have a shortcut “no” = “yes” set up. Now THAT would get me in trouble, I’m sure.

Tap on an individual shortcut to see it in more detail:

Yeah, that’s a bad one.

To delete it, rather confusingly, you need to back up to the Shortcuts summary screen, at which point you can swipe leftward to reveal a Delete button:

That’s it. Move to the keyboard shortcuts, find the offending shortcut, and delete it.

Then talk with your daughter about how she might want to think about keeping her iPod a bit more secure.