These vast new opportunities for social embarrassment are now being charted by the Web site Damn You Auto Correct! (D.Y.A.C. for short), where victims of autocorrect are invited to submit screen grabs of their most inglorious gaffes. Though D.Y.A.C. wasn’t the first to exploit this concept (a Tumblr feed with an unprintable twist on “iPhone” came first), it has quickly become an online sensation. Within days after Jillian Madison, co-founder of the Pophangover Network, set up the site in late October, D.Y.A.C. started getting a million daily page views, with hundreds of submissions every day. And now Madison has parlayed that success into a D.Y.A.C. book, due out in March.

Madison runs D.Y.A.C. as a one-person operation, slogging through submissions to find at least 25 new ones to post to the site every day, as well as keeping good ones in reserve for the book. “It consumes pretty much every waking moment,” she told me. “For now I’m enjoying it. It’s a crazy ride.”

Hannah’s screen grab of her father’s “divorce” message is one of the most popular (and least risqué) of the recent submissions to D.Y.A.C., but it was also hotly debated by commenters who doubted the possibility that a smartphone could autocorrect “Disney,” however badly typed, into “divorce.” In the comments, Hannah defended the exchange as authentic. “This actually happened to me and almost gave me a heart attack,” she averred, blaming the work of her father’s “fat fingers.”

The problem is that the results of such “fat-finger errors” are often not reproducible: iPhones, Android phones and other smartphones learn from the patterns of individual users so that suggested replacements are tailored to the history of a given phone, with a focus on recent and frequently used words. Since every phone develops a unique textual footprint, automatic corrections can vary from one device to another. (Madison, for her part, says that she and a pool of friends try to recreate the D.Y.A.C. submissions on their own cellphones before they are put up on the site.)

Despite these idiosyncrasies, amusement and frustration at the incorrectness of autocorrect are near-universal, particularly for users of the iPhone. Because the iPhone requires precise tapping to decline a pending suggestion, even seasoned users may miss the opportunity to pull back an autocorrected goof before sending it off. Moreover, the iPhone isn’t always adept at handling words typed with letters repeated for emphasis (a common style in text messaging). Thus yeahhhh will get changed to uranium, simply based on the proximity of letters on the keyboard.