Sunday 20 January 2013

You Cannot Be Serious, # 5

Today, a contribution from an alert Manglereader:


It's not apparent whether this was mangled by the representative from the NUT (that's the UK's National Union of Teachers, for the benefit of international readers) or the anonymous journalist. Both of them should have realized that 'behold' here was gibberish.*
 
Behove (or behoove, which US-English prefers, while UK-English uses either) is rather rare these days, but both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary include it as viable and in current usage.


* Given that one represents schoolteachers and the other writes for a living, both should also have known that the construction 'many official warnings' needs a plural verb form (more on verbal agreement soon), and that the 'not just' part of the not only but also formula should appear before 'to make a judgement' to make good sense.  However, since it's likely that the comments were made over the telephone, and possibly at short notice, these can't fairly be counted as full-blooded mangles.

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