Asterisk Corrections
Asterisk Corrections
[A screenshot of a text messaging app.] Other user: Do you have any weekend plans? User of this device: I'm gonna ride a horse on the beach at dawn *Eat *3AM *Couch *Pizza
[Caption below the panel:] I like how we can do corrections in text chat by appending words with asterisks and our brains just figure out where they go.

In text messages, asterisks are commonly used to denote a correction of some error in an earlier text. Asterisk corrections typically specify the corrected words, but do not explicitly mark the words that should be replaced. The words that should be replaced are simply the words in the message that make sense to be replaced by the correction, often the ones that are the closest by spelling or meaning to the correction.
In this comic, the messenger ( Randall ) corrects four such inaccuracies. The message, if the corrections were to be taken in order, might read "I'm gonna eat 3 AM on the couch at pizza." The typical reader should be sharp enough to know that it should read "I'm gonna eat a pizza on the couch at 3 AM.", replacing the ones that are closest by function in the sentence. Randall finds this remarkable.
Taken one at a time, it appears the reader would have the following sentences in their head:
I'm gonna ride a horse on the beach at dawn (original sentence - sounds adventurous and sporty) I'm gonna eat a horse on the beach at dawn (replacing the action - a figure of speech?) I'm gonna eat a horse on the beach at 3AM (replacing the time - occultish?) I'm gonna eat a horse on the couch at 3AM (replacing the location - lazily occultish, or worse?) I'm gonna eat a pizza on the couch at 3AM (replacing the food - not too odd, but very slobbish)
Human brains can process these corrections automatically because the syntax of most English sentences are as follows:
Subject — Verb — Object — Manner — Place — Time
Other languages have different word orders but generally have the same six categories.
The messenger's original sentence can be parsed as follows:
I (subject) — am gonna ride (verb) — a horse (object) — (no manner) — on the beach (place) — at dawn (time) .
Notice that the four corrections fall into four different categories in this structure, so there is only one sensible replacement:
"Couch" and "pizza" are both nouns so they could theoretically be subjects, but asterisk corrections must replace an existing part of the sentence satisfactorily, so the "'m" part of the verb prevents these third-person nouns from being parsed as the subject. Theoretically one could also swap "couch" and "pizza" around, giving "eat a couch on the pizza", but this makes much less practical sense than "eat a pizza on the couch". That said, in xkcd's fictional universe there is nothing to stop the character from eating a couch on a pizza.
In the title text, Randall says that he likes to make it as difficult as possible for his text recipient to guess where his correction should be, and uses the following sentence and correction:
"I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty." *witchcraft
The trick here is trying to figure out which word(s) should be replaced by "witchcraft". Broadly speaking, "witchcraft" could serve as an activity, but no words for activities exist in the original sentence, leaving the reader to guess at the intent. Possible solutions suggested in the comments are:
"I'd love to witchcraft , maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty." "I'd love to meet up, witchcraft in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty." "I'd love to meet up, maybe witchcraft a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty." (These three examples verbed "witchcraft" to mean "perform witchcraft".) "I'd love to meet up, maybe in witchcraft days? Next week is looking pretty empty." "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Witchcraft week is looking pretty empty." ( Witchcraft week is an event in Bargota, Spain.  It usually occurs in July, the month in which this comic strip was released, although this year's event in particular was canceled due to COVID-19 -- which would indeed make it pretty empty.) "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next witchcraft is looking pretty empty."
Of course, none of these solutions would be evident as correct to the recipient of the message, until Randall sends further corrections.
One absurdity in the main comic panel is that, after all four corrections has been parsed, the meaning of the resulting sentence has no connection with the original sentence whatsoever. However, asterisk corrections are generally used to correct typing mistakes, not to completely change the meaning of the original message. This raises suspicion as to why the messenger wrote the original sentence in the first place. Perhaps Randall does want to make the comic as difficult for his readers to parse as possible while making the point that asterisk corrections are usually quite intuitive to understand.
[A screenshot of a text messaging app.] Other user: Do you have any weekend plans? User of this device: I'm gonna ride a horse on the beach at dawn *Eat *3AM *Couch *Pizza
[Caption below the panel:] I like how we can do corrections in text chat by appending words with asterisks and our brains just figure out where they go.
