Not Washed or Cooked, # 71

The Telegraph offers a wince-inducing alternative spelling in its search routine:

Link: The Telegraph, search for ‘personal independence payments’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 70

Dr Faustus spotted this error on the map of Milestones Museum of Living History in Basingstoke:

Link: Milestones Museum of Living History, map

As I was putting this entry together, a sentence came to me, complete with erroneous spelling. I couldn’t think where it came from, but an online search found a familiar item, the duplicate of a mug my father was given one Christmas:

Link: eBay Australia, ‘JAPAN MUG’

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 89

This extract from the Kenilworth Weekly News was sent in by Dr the Homie Smith:*

Link: Kenilworth Weekly News, ‘Conservative tastes as PM boosts business’

* He says Crustum’s bread is excellent.

Double-take, # 26

Here is the rather perplexing opening line from a (fairly) recent advertisement by Morrisons:

Definitions from the Oxford Dictionaries website show that this is indeed a tautology:

Link: Oxford Dictionaries, ‘fillet’

Link: Oxford Dictionaries, ‘debone’

It may be, of course, that in fishmongers’ jargon, debone and fillet relate to different actions,* but of course the advertisement is aimed at the general reader…

* Does anyone know?

Not Washed or Cooked, # 69

Another from Bob Godiva:

Not Washed or Cooked, # 68

This is Amazon’s description of Bad Language by Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill, a book about poor use of English:

Link: Amazon.co.uk | Lars Andersson and Peter Trudgill, Bad Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 24

So many publications, so little time… My latest discovery is The Christian Post, and a recent headline made ambiguous by the absence of a (clearly required) apostrophe:

Link: The Christian Post | CPOpinion, ‘God Is Still Not Dead Despite Authors Claims’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 67

Worrying spelling from an establishment closely connected with education:

Link: ‘Education’, Innovative Media, Research and Commercialization Center (IMRC Center), University of Maine

Not as obvious as this though:

Link: Education Oppertunity Centre, Syracuse, NY

repeated on an alumna’s public-access entry on LinkedIn:

Link: LinkedIn, ‘Bennie Mae Edwards-Rucker’

and all over the Internet:

Link: Google, search term “Education Oppertunity Center”

Multimangle, # 2

A regular mangle plus an issue covered last December:

Link: BBC News, Leicester, ‘Leicester Globe pub closes over anti-military rumours’

Everards’ managing director with the shifting pronouns supported by one of the Beeb’s apostropheless reporters.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 23

Dr Faustus was targeted on Facebook with the following advertisement:

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 88

Bob Godiva has submitted possibly the most extreme example (swiftly corrected) we’ve had of why proofreading is important:

It’s not clear why the designer was so determined to keep repeating the product description, but it really emphasizes the error.

Multimangle, # 1

Not the first blog entry with multiple mangles, but one that justifies the creation of a new general category.

Extracted from the website for Heritage Open Days 2013:

Link: Heritage Open Days 2013, Cemex

The ‘ot’ obviously never met a spell-checker, a comma is needed after both tower, since there’s only one, and Church, while Mathews lacks both a possessive apostrophe and a second t.

To be fair, the church’s name presents a challenge elsewhere, including on its own community website, where it’s shown variously as 

Link: m2o Rugby

and

In the first instance, the abbreviation of Saint should not take a full stop since the word is not curtailed (in contrast to the St. used to represent Street). Instead, letters are missing from the middle, but it’s more usual simply to write St, rather than the strictly correct S’t (compare foc’s’le for forecastle), which looks both unwieldy and a little silly.

Both entries fail on possessive apostrophes. One has made no attempt to include any, while the latter correctly deals with St Oswald, but ignores the need to present St Matthew’s name in the possessive form. (Unlike Fortnum and Mason or Morecambe and Wise, the saints are not in a permanent partnership; thus if one requires an apostrophe, the other does too.)

The most sensible option, of course, would be to call it The Church of St Matthew and St Oswald: this is less of a tongue-twister and likely to involve less spitting when said aloud, and it removes the need for anyone to grapple with grammar when writing it down. This version is indeed what it says on the sign outside the church, and what the Archbishops’ Council’s A Church Near You website calls it, except for the hedging of bets when abbreviating saint:

Link: A Church Near You, St Matthew and St Oswald

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 22

Appalling misuse of apostrophes in the online job application pages at a Russell Group university:

do’s & don’ts

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 21

Problem punctuation, # 7

Hyphens: so small, but what a difference they can make!

Link: The Regency Fish Co. (homepage)

I’m sure most people would agree that it’s safest to use both hands when cooking, especially when using sharp implements. The above example would also benefit from a comma after ‘preparation’.

Punctuation has previously posed a challenge on the page. This is the opening sentence:

Not Washed or Cooked, # 66

Thanks to Des Pond of Slough for finding this gem:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Billionaire “Twiggy” Forrest enters Rinehart family fortunes fued’

Double-take, # 25

ASDA copywriters seem to be having trouble understanding the name of the second product listed here, though it isn’t the verbal or grammatical confusion that has brought about its recall:

Source: The Daily Telegraph, 12/10/13, p. 8

It’s not clear whether this is intended to be a ‘Wondrous Witches’ hat (part of a ‘Wondrous Witches’ range, perhaps) or a ‘Wondrous’ witch’s hat (from a ‘Wondrous’ range), or the hat of a witch who is wondrous, or simply a witch’s hat that is itself wondrous. The variant on ASDA’s website is capitalized in such a way as to make the whole construction appear to be the product’s name, though the intended meaning still isn’t clear:

Link: ASDA, Press Centre, ‘Product Recall: George Wicked Witch Kit and Asda Wondrous Witches Hat’

Later, the press release states:

The subordinate clause fails to achieve an agreement in number between the verb (is) and the nouns (care and safety, thus requiring are). This cavalier approach to grammar is echoed in the statement’s content. If customers’ care and safety really were ASDA’s ‘priority’, how could these two items have been passed as fit for sale? (On the same day, The Telegraph published another ASDA recall notice, for a hairdryer, on p. 20, and there is quite a list of live recalls on the retailer’s website, the majority being food products or items for children.)

Perhaps the company would benefit from greater care and precision all round…

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 27

Every autumn, a writer at The Telegraph feels obliged to concoct a ‘news’ report on this theme:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Discipline files reveal high jinks of Cambridge students’

The one above is from November 2010, and both headline and text are about par for the course. However, there seems to have been a small change this year ― and I’m not referring to the university concerned. This was printed in the newspaper:

Source: The Daily Telegraph, 12/10/13, p. 5

This appeared online:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Oxford Brookes University gets in a flap […]’*

In The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘high jinks’ is listed as definition 3 of jink, n.1. It’s thought to be related to the verb jink, and has Scottish roots; no variant spellings are shown in the description or the examples. Jinx originated in the USA and is derived from the modern-latinate jynx. (Apparently jinks is sometimes used in place of jinx.) Collins and Merriam Webster confirm that jinks and jinx are different words, with different meanings and unrelated etymologies.

Perhaps journalists should consider using the term pranks instead.

* The item’s full title was ‘Oxford Brookes University gets in a flap over students’ partridge-plucking exploits’. I can imagine the journalistic disappointment on discovering that the fowl weren’t pheasants…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 87

Des Pond of Slough found this unproofread caption (the stray code at the beginning is a bonus) beneath a Highly Commended entry to Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013:

Link: The Telegraph, Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013 (photograph 16)

(The photographs are well worth a visit, by the way.)

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 26

These two paragraphs from a BBC News report contain a couple of heinous errors:

Link: BBC News, ‘Child sex abuse victims failed by courts, says NSPCC’

The first paragraph mistakes sited for cited. In the second paragraph, the verbal shift in the final question might well confuse an adult, never mind a child, and certainly displays confusion on the part of the questioner. It’s not apparent whether the erroneous ‘was it not?’, in place of the syntactically viable ‘did it not?’ (because the initial statement is ‘It happened’, not ‘It was Friday’), is a direct quotation from some uncited (unsited?) source or an example made up by the journalist. The mangled sentence certainly does not appear in the NSPCC’s own press release.

Double-take, # 24

This is what automatically shows when you find a word on the Thesaurus.com website and post the URL:

Obviously better at direct articles than indirect articles…

How much and how many?

A forwarded message in my inbox, with the subject line: ‘Dr Faustus says: Someone doesn’t realise that you can count people...’ Here (edited slightly) is the offending email:

Dr Faustus commented: ‘Fewer than 18 students! Fewer than! /rage.’*

* The OxfordDictionaries page ‘“Less” or “fewer”?’ explains how to tell when to use less and when to use fewer. I’d also point out that the correct UK-English spelling is enrolment, and the use of the hyphen (presumably meant to represent a dash) is erroneous, since the ‘Many thanks’ clause and the passage beginning ‘unfortunately’ do not share a subject and should be separate sentences.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 65

Another spell-checking, proofreading, editing failure from the Telegraph’s Finance section:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Banks accused over “rip-off” rates on small loans’

Double-take, # 23

Don’t try this at home:

Link: Google’s cache of Halfords product entry

Double-take, # 22

Something has gone wrong with the deletion in this magazine advertisement for Marisota clothing:

Surely only the don’t should be crossed out for the tagline to make sense…

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 25

Compare these captions:

Link: Rugby Observer, ‘School aims to give pupils a taste of work’, p. 9

Current usage largely eschews the objective case of the relative pronoun who, but the resulting stylistic ugliness here, highlighted by the parallellism of the captions, surely shows there’s still room for whom. (Both subordinate clause should be preceded by a comma, of course.)

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 86

While we’re on the subject of ticket machines in car parks (see yesterday’s mangle):

Not Washed or Cooked, # 64

A friend has just asked me how I find the mangles I post. More to the point, how do I stop finding them? Mangles are all over the place: almost every book and newspaper I read, virtually every website I visit, everywhere I go, mangles surround me.

Yesterday I went into town with a friend, walked across a car park, chatting away, and two steps past the parking-ticket machine I stopped, reversed, double-checked, and got the camera out for this gem caught in the corner of my eye:

A traffic warden came over to see what I was doing. As soon as we told him there was an error, he spotted it and laughed a lot. I think I’ve made a new convert to the world of Mangling English. Perhaps I should make some cards to hand out…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 63

I should like to draw your attention to this humorous company name:

Link: Superbike Tyre, www.superbiketyre.co.uk | Sprokets

However, since the company is called Superbike Tyre, I can’t. How come the spelling is correct in the text when it’s wrong throughout the navigation apparatus?

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 20

Another apostromangle:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘“Silly” secularism is the new ‘elf ‘n safety, says MP’

It scarcely seems possible, but this is worse than the attempt by The Sun, which provided the first apostrophe catastrophe, in December 2012. At least The Sun’s story had a Christmas connection, so the elf reference made some sense.

Double-take, # 21

This howler captions a photograph of Laurence Fox and Billie Piper in the ‘TV&Showbiz’ section of the MailOnline:

Link: MailOnline, ‘The final tribute […]’