The Wrong Word Entirely, # 19

The two examples of today’s mangle both occur in the reproduction of direct speech, one in a novel and the other in a news report. First, the fiction:

Kristen Middleton, Zombie Games (Origins). Self-published (2013), p. 185. Link: Amazon LookInside

There is no hint elsewhere that the writer is attempting to reproduce individual characters’ grammar usage, so this seems to be an unfortunate error.

The factual piece reports a supposed sighting of the so-called Beast of Trowbridge:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Beast of Trowbridge… or Alsatian?’

It’s improbable that Mr Smith provided his contribution in writing, so the report is more likely to be quoting from a face-to-face or telephone interview with the witness. Either Mr Smith correctly said would have, or possibly the contraction would’ve, and the reporter mangled the grammar into ‘would of’; or Mr Smith said ‘would of’, and the reporter failed to convert this idiosyncratic or dialectal usage into standard English, as would be customary in the British media.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 82

This example contains the problematic cliché discussed yesterday, but the focus today is on the verb:

Link: John Hayes, Traditional Astrology. Weekly Horoscope for Taurus, 16 August 2013

Three nouns and a singular verb…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 81

Three examples of today’s mangle. First, a press release submitted to Reuters:

Link: ‘Global Branding d.b.a. Studione1 […]’

The second is from activities listed by the editor on the front page of issue 16 of SCIRE: Old Dominion University College of Sciences Newsletter:

Link: SCIRE: Old Dominion University College of Sciences Newsletter, 16 (December, 2002)

Finally, a document issued by The University of Queensland, Australia:

Link: Ageing Mind Initiative Newsletter, 10 (December, 2011)

Perhaps it’s time to dispense entirely with the aged cliché loose ends since it causes so much trouble…

Double-take, # 16

This recent news report qualifies in a couple of categories. Here are the headline and subhead:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Pharmacy charged NHS […]’

The oddities occur in the subhead, the key issue being the superfluous ‘cheaper’: if something costs ‘almost 30 times as much’ as an alternative, that alternative is self-evidently less expensive.

In addition, surely the pharmacy would claim the expense, not claim the expense back, from the NHS. Nor is it accurate to say that the pharmacy ‘gave’ the prescribed cod liver oil to patients: presumably at least some of them were paying a contribution towards the cost of medication (the prescription charge is currently £7.85) as well as contributing, or having contributed, towards the NHS via taxes.

 A sentence later in the report also provides a puzzle:

What ‘it’? The pronoun is a long way from its antecedent and the sentence as it stands makes it seem that the company neuters its pharmacists…

Double-take, # 15

What is the missing word?

Link: The Telegraph, Dacia competition

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 18

This is an unusual combination of products:

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 80

A little something is missing from this report from The Telegraph’s finance pages:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Banks close loopholes on account offers’

Double-take, # 14

Since having Sky installed some years ago, I’ve found very few errors on its schedule. This, however, is a beauty:

Gibbs’ should, of course, be Gibbs’s (this use of the possessive apostrophe was covered last week); but it’s the relationships that have confused the scheduler: both Gibbs and Fornell have (not concurrently) been married to the same woman, whose present husband’s abduction is the focal point of the episode. Definitely only one kidnap victim, so the are should be is.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 17

Dr Faustus comments: ‘Worse than the actual news reported is this hideous apostrophe catastrophe.’ It had been corrected on the BBC News webpage by the time the Chief Mangler arrived, but a search revealed numerous remnants of its earlier incarnation, beginning with the BBC News page:

Link: Google search on “German’s are uncomfortable with the size of European country bailouts”

The Internet is unforgiving and has a long memory. Check before posting!

If you were wondering where the ‘His boss is Germany’s leader is’ sentence might be going, that hasn’t been corrected: 

Not Washed or Cooked, # 54

An odd way to advertise services:

Link: BestPay

Contributor Richard Bonsor’s covering comment was: ‘Not very confident in their services: “upto” is now one word. “Complaint”?  I hope they are better with their mathematics.’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 53

The Guardian’s Consumer Champions are mangling again, this time with a placename that is much in the news at present:

Link: Guardian | Consumer Champions, ‘Gilbralta’ (and Aims Review address)

Not Washed or Cooked, # 52

Remember anaylst? Dr Faustus has found a variation on that mangle, this time from the blurb of an academic publication:

Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011. Link: Google Books

Sentences are not paragraphs

When did the arbiters of house style at BBC News decided to conflate the sentence and the paragraph? This comment appears in a guide called ‘How to write a press release’, targeted at schools:

Link: BBC | BBC News School Report | ‘How to write a press release’

Contrary to the assumption here, however, a staccato writing technique such as this frequently makes it more difficult to comprehend content, as well as requiring the reader to discern connections that the writer should be making plain.

An example can be found in the opening section of the report that supplied yesterday’s mangle:

Link: BBC News, ‘“Unclear” Surrey Magna Carta plans under spotlight’

Various issues arise. The report shows that the ‘one or two facts’ method does not indicate the relationship between different facts or sets of facts: for example, what relation does the ‘Egham’ paragraph bear to the information that immediately precedes and follows it? The information that is shown is not clear or unambiguous: for instance, does ‘Egham was to be branded “the gateway to Magna Carta country” at Runnymede’ mean there was to be a branding launch ceremony at Egham? At Runnymede? The failure to explicitly connect one insular set of facts to another makes it seem as if all of the council’s £1m, and the total £8.3m, was to be spent on the branding exercise: is this true (a ‘fact’) or not?

The problem is that these ‘single sentence paragraphs’ are not being used ‘quite often’, and in a specific manner and for a specific purpose, as ‘How to write a press release’ implies, but all the time and without thought. In BBC News writing, sentence has become synonymous with paragraph. In the report on the Magna Carta commemoration, every sentence is treated as a paragraph, as if each were self-contained and logically complete. There’s no denying that breaking down content in this way is sometimes useful (if facing the audience with very long sentences to read onscreen, for instance); but the technnique, if overused, disrupts both the flow of the syntax and the text’s logic. It is, of course, possible for a sentence to be completely self-contained: the opening paragraph in the BBC report above is a perfectly valid single-sentence paragraph. However, treating all sentences as paragraphs undermines the text’s coherence by blurring the causal relationships and the logic of the progressions.

Paragraphs are intended to draw together material that is closely associated, making the connections in the content immediately and visually apparent, in order to aid the reader’s understanding. The correct composition of paragraphs is a subject that occurs in many of the BBC’s ‘Bitesize’ education pages. Perhaps BBC News should require its journalists and editors to take its quiz on paragraphs, and revise the topic where necessary:

Succinct and corrrect, even if the syntax of the question and answer are not always harmonized…

Double-take, # 13

This sentence, in a BBC News report on commemorating Magna Carta, is not best phrased:

Link: BBC News, ‘“Unclear” Surrey Magna Carta plans under spotlight’

The above screenprint was taken on 14 August, 2013, at 11:22. Someone has obviously recognized the phrasing as problematic, as the later edition (14 August at 15:36) has added punctuation:

Instead of removing the problem, this has emphasized it. Yet it could have been resolved quite easily by moving a single word to the previous paragraph and deleting the rest of the phrase:

Not Washed or Cooked, # 51

Another spell-checking and proofreading fail from the Telegraph’s Finance section:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘The best cash incentives offered by banks’

Maybe that’s why the Rolling Stones couldn’t get any…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 16

Today, another apostrophe — or rather another gap where an apostrophe should be — in a prayer that was posted on Facebook, and which you can buy, with minor variations and less punctuation, as a poster at Zazzle:

Here, of course, Jesus needs a possessive apostrophe and a possessive s: Jesus’s. I’m not sure when and where the habit began of not adding the normal ’s to singular nouns ending in s, but it isn’t right, it isn’t clear, and it offers much opportunity for error and misunderstanding. The added possessive ending should also be pronounced…

The rules are covered in Oxford Dictionaries, under ‘Apostrophe’. However, I can’t agree with OxfordDictionaries about the correctness of exemptions to the rule (and I’m backed by both the British MHRA Style Guide and the North American MLA Style Manual on this): all singular nouns ending  in s, common and proper, should take a final s after the possessive apostrophe.

OxfordDictionaries offers St Thomas’ Hospital to exemplify the exemptions. Wikipedia points out that it was ‘usually known as St Thomas’s Hospital until the late 20th century’ — but why should some idiot’s grammatical fail be allowed to mar and mangle the moniker of an ancient institution?* I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it St Thomas’ Hospital (i.e. St Thomas Hospital) only St Thomas’s Hospital (St Thomasez Hospital).


* A brief history of the hospital can be found on The Old Operating Theatre: Museum and Herb Garret website, which points out that the hospital ‘was described as ancient in 1215’.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 50

I don’t know whether this means that today’s mangle is a localized issue, but all three of the examples that I’ve found come from the Antipodes:

Link: LinkedIn | Scott Kerse, Partner at PwC, Auckland, New Zealand

Link: News.co.au | Business | ‘So you want to be an entreprenuer?’

 Link: BusinessVictoria, ‘Overcoming challenges as a young entreprenuer’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 49

Yesterday’s mangle demonstrated confusion between complimentary and complementary (or was perhaps an unchecked typographical error). This text has the correct word, but definitely needed spell-checking…

Link: Vitality Gym & Health Club | Facilities

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 18

In my attempt to tidy the archive, I found this mangle that crept into The Telegraph in January 2013:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Cosmetics company seeks new look’

The subclause is awkwardly phrased, but that isn’t the main issue. If you’re involved in cosmetics, I imagine compliments should ideally feature somewhere, but certainly not in this sentence: the word required is complementary. 

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 75

Des Pond of Slough sends this:

Link: BBC News, Eyewitness

and comments: ‘I could be a Social Affairs Correspondent. Hang on, that’s not a job title: he’s a Social affairs correspondent. Friendly, adulterous and communicative, in that order?’

It’s a fair point. Capitalization seems to be becoming random, yet the dozen or so grammar sites I’ve checked this morning agree that a job title relating to a specific person and role, following the person’s name and identifying the capacity is which that person is operating in the immediate circumstances (e.g., John Cross, Features Editor), should be capitalized, whereas the term used to describe a working role more broadly (John Cross is a features editor or John Cross is the features editor) should not.

It makes sense: this is, after all, related to the issue of common and proper nouns. In the case of the fictitious John Cross, the compound noun in John Cross is the features editor is a generic descriptor of a role, and thus a common noun; while the construction John Cross, Features Editor presents Features Editor as a formal job title and a proper noun.

In today’s example, Michael Buchanan is writing not in his private capacity, but specifically in his role as Social Affairs Correspondent for BBC News, and so should use capitals. If the byline offered a descriptor instead of a formal job title (Michael Buchanan is a/the social affairs correspondent for BBC News), capitals would not be appropriate.

This is something that a spell-checker cannot correct…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 49

Here’s an old friend:

Link: The Surrealists, ‘Recieves grace [sic] by Yves Tanguy’

So recieves appears for receives, while the punctuation needs work: a comma is needed before by. 

There’s another issue here which we’ll come back to sometime soon: when did titles stop being presented as titles and start being treated as plain phrases or sentences? (The missing comma above accentuates the issue in this case.) You don’t expect to see book conventions (generally titles italicized for long/big works, or placed in quotation marks for smaller ones) followed everywhere, but titles used to have capital letters on the key words (mainly, but not exclusively, nouns and verbs) — that’s how you know they are titles and which words are in the title. The practice seems to be dying out, even including in some books and academic publications; and (unsurprisingly) the result is that it is frequently difficult to distinguish titles from surrounding text…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 15

Spotted on an advertising hoarding, this is a variant of the issue addressed in the first Apostrophe catastrophe:

The opening quotation mark should, of course, be an apostrophe, since it’s representing a missing letter within the contraction. Perhaps that should have warned filmgoers what to expect…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 14

Two recent examples of a common error:

 Link: The Telegraph, ‘What next for savings rates?’

 

 Link: BBC News, ‘Herne Hill properties flooded […]’

There are further punctuation issues (notably, but not exclusively, in the second extract), but the key point here is that both sentences lack the apostrophes required in ordinary possessive constructions. The former, discussing ‘the difference of thousands of pounds’, should be thousands of pounds’ difference; and the latter should transmit ‘the worth of thousands [of pounds]’ as thousands’ worth of products.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 13

nPower’s second appearance within weeks (the first was also connected with reading meters) contains something that shouldn’t have made it to the published page, and didn’t go through a spell-checker:

Source: nPower personalized customer webpage

Perhaps not surprising considering the odd capitalization of the company’s name…

Problem punctuation, # 5

A completely random comma from the opening sentence of a recent Telegraph article:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘How welfare reform boosted property profits’

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 17

This example of a misunderstood word, which occurs in various places, is from the online catalogue of The Original Sofa Co:

 Link: Original Sofa Co.,‘The Grenville’

— unless it’s a subtle characterization of the British electorate as a flock of chickens…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 79

The word order in the final paragraph below is suffering from inversion:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Mortgage rates […]’

I suppose it’s possible that buying only 41% might be cheaper than renting, but the Forbes article online clarifies matters: ‘At 3.9% […] buying is 41% cheaper than renting nationally.’*

The Telegraph’s headline, ‘Mortgage rates only need rise “0.69pc” to make renting cheaper’, is not best phrased, since it confuses the adjective only with the adverb only. The context shows that this only relates to the sum and thus should be placed next to it, not by the verb.

* It’s not apparent why the British media now tends to shun the traditional percentage sign in favour of the abbreviation pc.

 

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 16

This, one of several bullet points beneath a very long headline in the online Mail (11 January, 2013), has puzzled me for a while:

Link: MailOnline, ‘Solicitors “ran immigration scam […]”’

Quite apart from the fact that the formulation makes it sound as if the writer (or possibly the gang) is uncertain of the meaning of brides and husbands, the sentence is illogical since the two aren’t equivalent: brides or bridegrooms or wives or husbands, but not brides or husbands.

The fashion for newspapers to install paywalls is spreading fast, so I fear that mangles from the media may soon become rare.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 15

Perhaps the large number of words here that correctly contain double e led to this rather unfortunate suggestion in a to-do list left on a whiteboard:

Cheeking people if you need them is probably not a good idea. Checking who you need is wise though.

Note: do wipe boards when you’ve finished with them … or risk being mangled (and unpopular with the room supervisors)!

Double-take, # 12

Des Pond of Slough was slightly puzzled by content in an email from the Open University:

He remarks: ‘I would assume that “modern advertising” was still using 13th- to 17th-century techniques, or have I fallen through a temporal anomaly?’

It’s also worth pointing out that the phrase ‘the 13th to 17th century’ needs another direct article, might benefit from pluralizing its noun (‘the 13th to the 17th centuries’), and would seem more elegant, and thus more professional, without the unnecessary abbreviations (thus: ‘the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries’), which might have resulted in fewer errors in the first place.

Problem punctuation, # 4

Gary Hazell contributes this, from a tee shirt sold by the Pilgrim Bandits, a charity founded by Special Forces veterans:

The quotation comes from James Elroy Flecker’s ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’:

THE MASTER OF THE CARAVAN:
But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes,
You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?

THE PILGRIMS:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further […] 

Quoted from the version on Ruth’s Jordan Jubilee: The Country and the People of Jordan

Clearly someone has tried hard to adapt this for comprehensible use without the need to identify the dramatis personae and thus has inserted (some) speech marks. However, something seems to have gone very wrong with this process, while changes to the punctuation (notably the removal of both the question mark and the comma preceding ‘master’) and capitalization cause some confusion. The alterations to ‘“You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?”’ suggest the line is not fully understood.

It might have been better to quote the Pilgrims’ words alone (and remove the ‘master’), since these both make the Pilgrim Bandits’ point and make perfect sense without the Caravan Master’s question.