Yes, the UI is so overloaded you can never tell what it's going to do. It might do two or three totally different things. Obviously you want to have the magnifying glass with a cursor. But then the cursor might just decide to jump to the end of the word. Sometimes it's impossible to get the cursor in front of the first letter if the UI is cramped. Maybe it will copy the text into a floating clipboard if your finger drifts a few pixels south. Maybe it will bring up a context menu? If you're using Safari, maybe it won't even let you select any text at all. Then you can take a screenshot and select text from an image to work around that.