Lion bonus: Turn symbol & text substitution as a shorthand expander or frequent error fixer

Question

I know auto-correct is irritating a lot of people. And it has limitiations in its smartness: Why doesn't it auto-correct when one makes the fairly common error of capitalizing the first two letters in a word? MS Office's auto-correct did that as standard behavior.
I have discovered, however, that a related feature can be used as a text expander, allowing you to make personal shorthands that then get expanded automatically.
It's the Text panel in the Language & Text panel in System Preferences.
In this, you will see a group titled "Use symbol and text substitution." (It's a toggle setting.) There's a list of typical items--turning "(c)" into © (it doesn't work in this browser-based text entry box, for whatever reason). You can add items to this list.
Just click the + button at the bottom of the list, and type in the shorthand you want to use, and its expansion text. If you want multiline/multiparagraph expanded text, use Option+Return to put the line breaks in, or type the text you want to use in any text editor, copy the text, and paste it into the "with" space.
It has a limitation that bugs me--that is, that first two letters capitalized error I mentioned above. I thought I could fix that for at least some of my common instances of that, such as THe for The or THanks for Thanks. But it is not literal enough--if you put in that particular substitution, it will use it whether you've made the error or not--that is, whether you incorrectly type "THe" or correctly type "the," it substitutes "The." Obviously, not what you'll want most of the time.

Answer 1

That sounds like a very good useful tip. I would hold on to it in your own computer's repository as well and post sections of it whenever you see someone needing help with it until you are able to add it to the contributions section of the User Tip forum here:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=103