Not Washed or Cooked, # 48

This is odd:

Source: Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, ‘The Second Person: Meaning and Metaphors.’ Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1562 (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence): Computation for Metaphors, Analogy, and Agents, ed. by Chrystopher L. Nehaniv (1999), 380–88 (p. 380). Link: Google Books, ‘swam in a flock of swams’

The swams, of course, shouldn’t even have made it through a spell-checker…

Just to make it absolutely clear that this is definitely an error and not some kind of arcane computer science terminology, here’s a detail of the volume’s cover:

Link: Google Books, Computation for Metaphors, Analogy, and Agents, 1562 (1999)

which clearly depicts a flock of swams swans.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 17

Des Pond of Slough provides this:

He comments: ‘I suppose we should be grateful it’s not Clock Tower’s.’ Then there’s the random capitalization…

Mangling Meaning, # 15

We featured a mangle from the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War a couple of weeks ago, but that was a straightforward homophone. This error is harder to fathom:

London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2006, p. 209. Link: Google Books, ‘bodies’ concerned’

The grammar-checking function in both Word and WordPerfect fail to identify a problem in this sentence; nor was the problem detected by the few free grammar checkers I tried it out on, although Reverso did correct the sentence — to this nonsense:

Reverso uses the Ginger grammar-checking software, whose installed version offered exactly the same nonsensical stylistic alteration when used with Word. (Ginger is available in both free and premium versions: perhaps the latter would have identified the error, but somehow I doubt it.) Grammarly identified two ‘critical writing issues’, but wanted me to sign up for a free trial to obtain any details. One issue was shown under Plagiarism, which was fair enough. However, the other wasn’t listed as a Grammar error, but under Style and Word Choice, so I’m guessing that signing up would reveal the same ‘correction’ Reverso offered.

Let’s get back to the problematic sentence:

Just like we are now – safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies’ concerned.

The issue here is nothing to do with whether the possessive pronoun our is correct (it is), but the inexplicable apostrophe. What is it doing here? What is it for?

My best guess is that Max Brooks planned to write an abbreviation, and either failed to complete it or became tangled up in both singular and plural forms and the correct position of the abbreviating apostrophe. The intended sentence might thus be one of these:

Just like we are now – safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our body’s concerned.

Just like we are now – safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies’re concerned.

The first offering assumes plural bodies has been inserted accidentally in place of the notional singular form body, and that the intention was to write the contraction for body is. The second assumes that Brooks intended to telescope bodies are (cf. they’re), but somehow he omitted, or someone accidentally edited out, the crucial re.

Double-take, # 11

Keeping on the subject of fauna, these are incredibly large tits – but only in imperial measurements:

Source: Rob Hume, RSPB Birds of Britain and Europe, rev. edn (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), p. 316

Not Washed or Cooked, # 47

Seen in the pond section of a garden centre:

Quite a sweet name, but actually called shubunkins… Admittedly, the word is specialized and thus isn’t commonly included in wordlists (Word, WordPerfect and Blogger all highlight it, for instance), but Google certainly recognized shubumkin as wrong and offered the right word instead, and if you’re selling them, presumably you are a specialist…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 78

Josh Polchar recently spotted a hideous error in The Telegraph. Mangling English was too late to obtain the printed newspaper to determine the spelling used there, and the online version had been corrected, but the error’s legacy remains on a few websites, such as World News Inc., that trawl for news and reproduce items verbatim:

Link: Google search on “peers gave their ascent”

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 77

Source: printed document

Some proofreading seems in order to make the syntax work…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 76

The read at the top here seems to have slipped though nPower’s proofreading net:

No link: page accessible only via login

However, similar usage on other pages shows that it isn’t a typographical error at all:

Link: nPower, ‘Providing a meter reading’

While read exists as a noun, it is not a synonym of reading when used in this context. OED even has a special section under meter relating to reading meters, in which the term read does not feature as a viable alternative:

‘meter-reading n. the reading of a meter or meters; an instance of this; (also) a reading displayed on or recorded by a meter.’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 46

Today’s example comes from The Guardian’s Capital Letters consumer troubleshooting column:

Link: The Guardian | Money | Capital Letters | ‘Put me in the picture about my camera’

The mangle is reprehensible, since it’s been subject to neither spell-checking nor proofreading; but, in the context of the mangle, the opening sentence of the consumer champion’s response is sublime.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 16

Here’s a sentence from the Android version of a BBC News article:

It’s correct in the online version, whose update time is identical to that of the Android post. Other than the position of the apostrophe, the posted sentences are identical, suggesting that someone has deliberately moved the apostrophe during the editing process, either from the incorrect to the correct position or vice versa. I don’t know the procedure (anyone able to offer enlightenment?), but I’d guess that the Android version is edited down from the online text.… in which case: ouch.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 15

This one keeps coming round. This time, an email from Nectar makes an ambiguous remark:

Is it intended as a helpful warning (‘Get ready for kids! Summer holidays!’) which simply lacks closure in its first sentence? Or, more likely, should kids have an apostrophe and summer not be treated as a proper noun?

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 75

The error here was spotted by Richard Bonsor:

Link: Pink News, ‘Christian Voice leader: “Tesco support for gay rights to blame for super mouse infestation”’

Richard comments: ‘“A live mice was seen running along the floor of the warehouse.” Pretty sure a dead one wouldn’t do that and I’m even more sure the singular isn’t mice.’

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 74

Today, proper nouns versus common nouns. First, a mangle:

Link: BBC News, ‘for god’s sake’

Nouns identify people, places and things. A common noun refers to general or non-specific items: a cat, a car, an uncle. All of these may be given individual names — Garfield, Ferrari Testarossa, Uncle Tom — but they simultaneously maintain their generality: Garfield is a cat, a Testarossa is a car, Tom is an uncle.

A proper noun relates to something specific, perhaps even unique; and thus it is often a name, whether of a person, a place, a product or whatever. As the above examples show, a proper noun is distinguished by the use of an initial capital letter. Hence a person might be named Rodriguez or Zhi Peng, even if that person is also more generally a father or an uncle. Specific places are also generic types: Tasmania and Goa are, respectively, states in Australia and India. Products follow a similar pattern: Sellotape is a brand of sticky tape; Hibiki is a brand of Japanese whisky.

Sometimes the same basic noun has common and proper variants, and this trips people up. For instance, the Greek deity Zeus and his Roman counterpart Jupiter have individual names, but are also (common noun) gods. However, Christianity, being monotheistic and thus not dealing in general gods, but a single god, converts that common noun into a proper noun: the Christians’ god is called God.

This rule applies even if the writer is an atheist: this is not a religious issue, but a grammatical one. After all, Zeus still has a capital Z even though no-one believes in him any more, and since only God is named God, it would be as incorrect to refer to Zeus and Jupiter as Gods, rather than gods, as it is to use the proper noun without an initial capital.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 73

Given the generally sad reviews of the film World War Z, someone recommended that I read the original book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

Here’s a mangle from it:

London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2006, p. 209. Link: Google Books, ‘started to wretch’

The word wretch, as used in British and North American English, is a noun with various meanings, of which probably the best known relate to a miserable or unfortunate person, or a reprehensible one. OED also lists an obsolete verb, meaning 1) ‘To render miserable’ or 2) ‘To be or become niggardly or parsimonious’.

The correct spelling for the context is retch.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 72

What an odd address:

The email shows elsewhere that it’s actually Castle Mews. Perhaps the writer should have copied the correct version instead of retyping — well, mistyping — it.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 71

Des Pond of Slough contributes this, with the comment ‘Too many Coventries’:

Link: BBC News, ‘M6 in Warwickshire closed by fabric conditioner spill’

Fortunately, he’d taken a screenshot, because it had been corrected when I arrived. It would have been better still had it been corrected before being uploaded in the first place.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 45

Another day, another mangle… This comes from a list of selling points on a dental practice’s website:

Link: Bilton Dental Clinic

Two nouns associated to form an adjective should be linked by a hyphen, not simply run into a single, new word. That would also give the spellchecker (if used) a chance, although basic proofreading should have picked the omission up.

On another page, the clinic has this rather odd construction:

Link: Bilton Dental Clinic | Expert Dental Treatment

Either ‘Some of the treatments we offer’, or ‘The treatments we offer include’. Not both.

The site offers more wincing-inducing moments, and this not very reassuring reassurance:

Link: Bilton Dental Clinic | Expert Dental Treatment

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 70

Definitely something missing here:

Link: Which? Buildings insurance information

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 69

Des Pond of Slough spotted this in an article about Rupert Brooke:*

 Link: Rugby Observer, ‘New book shines light on Rupert Brooke’s true character’

Strange to use the correct and the incorrect relative pronoun in the same sentence, and most probably a typographical error.

Elsewhere, the article adopts some odd punctuation in the presentation of Brooke’s poetry:

The punctuation strongly suggests that the writer hasn’t understood the meaning of the lines. The passage is usually presented and punctuated like this:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field 

That is for ever England.

It’s perfectly acceptable to quote a few lines of poetry without presenting them line-by-line like this (a method also known as insetting or displaying), as the source presents them; but the quotation should be introduced by a colon, not a dash (and certainly not by a hyphen), and must otherwise exactly reproduce the original, including the lines’ initial capital letters, which are vital in a run-on quotation to show where the lines break:

He left behind poems which were to cement his reputation, most notably The Soldier, with its iconic opening lines: “If I should die think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.”

An academic text would use different conventions, distinguishing the title with quotation marks and marking line breaks less ambiguously by using a forward slash / or a vertical line | between the lines:

He left behind poems which were to cement his reputation, most notably ‘The Soldier’, with its iconic opening lines: ‘If I should die think only this of me:/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.’

All these methods maintain the original syntax so as not to compromise the meaning.
  

* The article isn’t implying that poets are innocent, pure and clean-living, as this out-of-context quotation suggests. It discusses Nigel Jones’s new biography of Brooke, which shows his ‘golden boy’ persona to be a later construct, intended to recruit young men into the forces in the Second World War.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 14

Kudos for the whom, BBC, but chunk?

Link: BBC News, ‘Sharp decline in foreign student numbers’

Chunk isn’t a synonym for proportion or number, either of which would be better here.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 13

A homophone has not been proofread out in the first sentence here. It’s unfortunate that the following paragraph mocks someone’s inaccurate spelling…

Link: Google Books, Linda S. Clayton, Just Buried

Not Washed or Cooked, # 44

This mangle seems to have originated in the blurb supplied by Random House of Canada for The Dutch Oven Cookbook, but thought-free cut-and-pasting has disseminated it across the Internet:

Link: Random House of Canada, The Dutch Oven Cookbook

Problem punctuation, # 3

The phrasing here is awkward and repetitive, and the comma after ‘Lord Dear’ inexplicable:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘“Insulting” words crime which made it illegal to call a police horse “gay” …’

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 68

A fairly common mangle demonstrating the importance of proofreading:

Link: MTV, ‘MTV’s Brand New for 2012 Artists Announced!’

This one hasn’t been spellchecked either:

Link: Huemans.com, ‘Ineractive Radio For Unsinged Music’

Mangling Meaning, # 14

One of several mangles in a booklet issued by a UK university to explain its pension scheme:

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 14

The BBC ― long associated with delivering education — demonstrating a woeful lack of possessive apostrophes:

Link: BBC | Radio 1 | Newsbeat, ‘Musicians frustration’

Android version

 

Link: Twitter version

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 13

Telegraph 0―Guardian 1:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Societies ability’

Link: The Guardian, ‘societies’ ability’

  

As well as the accurate use of the possessive apostrophe, The Guardian offers better capitalization and paragraphing: the initial capital of the Telegraph’s ‘Societies’ is superfluous, and it’s nonsensical to split this short quotation into separate paragraphs. This is becoming a habit in online journalism; the BBC is another frequent offender.

A paragraph may in some instances be a single sentence; but a sentence is not a paragraph.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 43

Operating instructions on the back of a pack of Macrae smoked salmon:

Not Washed or Cooked, # 42

This event, advertised for September 2011, can still be found on the website Examiner.com:

Link: Examiner.com, ‘First Time Homeburyer’s Workshop’

Maybe the workshop was run by this estate agent:

 Link: Realtor.com | find a REALTOR® | hannibal, mo | linda daniels real estate agent

Mangling Meaning, # 13

Ther are several ways this request might be reported. A gerund isn’t any of them…

Link: The Independent, ‘Questions Of Cash: Mistakes and delays that left a £15,000 hole in my pension’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 41

Thinking of going on holiday? Some days may be more difficult for travel than others, especially on flights from Birmingham Airport:

Link: Birmingham Airport | Route Finder (detail/edit)