Double-take, # 79

More duplication (not to mention decidedly inelegant syntax) found by Dr Faustus:

Link: BBC News, ‘Gove rebuts claims of American author ban’

To Kill a Mockingbird Bird

Double-take, # 78

Dr Faustus has found a paragraph with a much-mangled main clause:

Link: WalesOnline, ‘Under Milk Wood: 7 things to look for as film hits BBC Four’

the first first chance viewers from across the UK the first time it will have been broadcast

Not Washed or Cooked, # 148

Dr Faustus presents… struggles with a spacebar:

Source: BBC News (tablet edition), ‘Oakeshott quits Lib Dems with Clegg “disaster” warning’ — Analysis section

Most of the errors have been corrected on the webpage version, although hyphens still represent dashes and the first erroneous space remains. News Sniffer hosts a souvenir of the mangled version.

spacebar issues: Oakeshott ’s parting shot; Bu the suggests; four polls."Even if; yesterday- when

Double-take, # 77

Pop Spencer came upon this:

Link: Groupon, ‘Personalised Acrylic Photo Print in Choice of Sizes […]’

You can imagine the discussion.

‘Now, when you create the webpage, you need to put in eight points about the product — it’s got to be eight, OK?’
‘But there aren’t eight things on this list.’
‘Well, rejig one of them a bit and stick it in again. No-one’ll notice.’

I’m not convinced by ‘shiny appearance’ either: isn’t ‘shiny’ self-evidently linked to ‘appearance’?

duplication (Resistant to light and water/light and water resistant) & redundancy (Shiny appearance

Right word, wrong form, # 2

Link: The University of Iowa Info Center [sic], ‘Creating a “White List” in Eudora — Article 2746’

It seems strange that a different method needs to be found then… Did the writer mean ‘daunting’? undaunting for daunting

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 48

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Celia Walden has a little work done’

Having featured this mangle on January 27 and 28 this year, I had started to wonder how widespread it is: the instances I’d found (of which I included only a small sample) suggested it was an error localized to North America and South Africa. Today’s example, however, was printed in a British publication and is by a British writer, Celia Walden. According to her profile on her agent’s website, Walden was educated at Westminster School and Cambridge University, so really has no excuse for making errors like this.

taught for taut (reprise)

Not Washed or Cooked, # 147

Dr Faustus spotted a classic mangle outside the British Museum:

Univeristy of London

Singular or Plural? # 7

For no reason that I can discern, various writers have recently acquired a habit of harnessing a singular verb to a subject made up of two clearly disparate nouns connected with the conjunction and, thus:

Link: The Sunday Times, breadcrumb — quotation from ‘Table Talk: Beast, London W1’

In addition to ignoring the basic principle of grammatical number, upon which the authorities and textbooks seem to be in agreement, a combination of this kind disrupts the flow by creating confusion in the reader. Are both nouns supposed to be there, or has something gone wrong in the editing process? If the writer had intended to remove one of the nouns, which one? The questions are unanswerable, but the reader is now distracted and, depending on the type of work, may even have lost confidence in the writer’s authority.

The tendency is becoming more widespread in journalism, and it occurs habitually in some students’ written work. This suggests either that the error is being transmitted at school by certain teachers who themselves misunderstand the grammar, or that the error is not been flagged, possibly because of the modern practice of correcting only a quota of mistakes in written work.

the expense and value is

Double-take, # 76

Sport again today, this time tennis. Here, courtesy of Dr Faustus, is a verbal slip in a BBC report of Simona Halep’s comments on her defeat by Maria Sharapova in the French Open:

Link: BBC Sport, ‘French Open: Maria Sharapova proud of “amazing” clay victory’

As Dr Faustus points out, ‘It’s not clear whether the error was made by Halep herself (speaking), by the transcriber, or by the journalist, or all three.’ It is clear, however, that it should have been spotted in the editing or proofreading process and removed before publication.

that moments

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 47

Pop Spencer has submitted a topical mangle:

Link: MirrorOnline, World Cup 2014, ‘England’s World Cup loss […]’

I see this error quite often in publications and in students’ essays, and it seems not to be confined to a particular area or even country of origin. The fact that some writers insert then for than more than once — in some cases, several times — in a single work suggests that it cannot always be dismissed as a typographical error or other accidental slip, but is, in some cases at least, a misusage that should have been corrected at some point.

I’ve not so far come across the reverse error, than for then.

then for than

Not Washed or Cooked, # 146

New contributor Just Nick has found this gem, whose excessive punctuation is unlikely to be an ironic comment on the mangle:

Link: The Beechwood Hotel — Restaurant

The page does not improve as it continues:

Sic. Or perhaps sic!!!
comming; our selves; unfinished text

Not Washed or Cooked, # 145

Another unconvincing scam from my mailbox, this one a fail from its subject line:

Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Christian calendar, and we have a bonus: some mangled Latin. This unfortunate error is found in a misrepresentation of the title of a section of a hymn, ‘Sacris solemniis’, written for the occasion by St Thomas Aquinas:

Link: YouTube, ‘C Franck Penis angelicus Ave Maria Archikatedra we Fromborku’

The penis here is clearly misplaced: Aquinas is not concerned with angels’ genitals, but with their bread (panis).

recived + Penis angelicus

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 47

This doesn’t even exist!

Source: Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda, 1914-18 and After (London: Batsford, 1989), p. 6

Their’s not to reason why, | Their’s but to do or die

Not Washed or Cooked, # 144

Source: Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Comparative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 165

A Google search reveals that activites often congregate in this way…

activites

Not Washed or Cooked, # 143

Source: The New Statesman, ‘University Challenge: envy and misogny’

misogny

Double-take, # 75

This recipe for Tarragon Chicken with Red Onion and Mushrooms initially qualified simply because of the failure to press the spacebar in instruction number 1. I’ve reproduced it in full because of two other oddities that arise in the list of ingredients:

Link: Sainsbury’s ‘Live Well for Less’, Tarragon Chicken with Red Onion and Mushrooms

The first is the fact that nowhere on the page is there a double asterisk corresponding to the one by the entry for chicken, so it’s impossible to tell why the asterisks are there or what further information or warning they might be flagging. The second is the final ingredient, which seems to have wandered in from another recipe entirely…

andadd; orphaned **; random ingredient

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 46

This nasty little mangle last featured in October 2013. It’s no prettier now:

Link: Questia, Footnotes, 2:10 (May 2014)

do’s & don’ts

Double-take, # 74

Simply Home Entertainment omitting things again:

Source: Simply Home Entertainment, June 2014, p. 4

working in a German.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 46

This has been going the rounds on Facebook, and I haven’t been able to trace its source. Given the system of pairings in the list, it seems clear that the wrong word has been chosen in the first pair:

Original source unknown

Complement has been mistaken for compliment. These words, identical bar the one vowel, have very different meanings. To borrow the definitions from Oxford Dictionaries, complement as a verb means to ‘add to something in a way that enhances or improves’, while compliment means to ‘admire and praise someone for something’.

OED shows that both derive from the same Latin root (complēmentum, meaning ‘that which fills up or completes’, from the verb complēre, ‘to fill up’), and come into English via French. It notes too that complement was sometimes used for compliment in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries.
complements for compliments

Not Washed or Cooked, # 142

A mangled breadcrumb…

Link: The Telegraph, breadcrumb on ‘Word of mouth: Bee’s Bakery […], cookies and cakes with a difference’

fraudtsers

Double-take, # 73

Subsequently corrected (after some days), here is an original and very forward-looking byline:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Coca Cola in controversy over £20m “anti-obesity” drive’

and an associated breadcrumb:

I would have thought that items were date-stamped automatically, so this seems quite an oddity.

June for May, so ‘published’ a month before date

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 131

A superb find by Des Pond of Slough:

Source: Geddes & Grosset Classical Mythology (New Lanark: Geddes & Grosset, 1997), p. 456

hugh fig tree

Double-take, # 72

The information in the two clauses here is confusingly contradictory:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Union boss who wouldn’t pull a sickie…’

Although the phrase ‘pull a sickie’ is a well-established British colloquialism, defined (with a helpful list of alternatives) by BBC Learning English as ‘to pretend to be ill so you can take time off work’, whoever wrote the headline seems to think it refers to legitimate sick leave.

pull a sickie for taking sick leave

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 45

A brief return to astrologers’ mangles:

Link: John Hayes — Traditional Astrology, ‘Aquarius Monthly Horoscope — June 2014’

For the uninitiated (which apparently includes this astrologer), the term is ‘turning retrograde’. Has John Hayes become a victim of Mercury, whose retrogrades herald communication problems, or is this another parapraxis?

earning retrograde

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 130

Another oddity from the inbox of Dr Faustus, who wanders [sic]: ‘Is a last night party male?!’
male party? wonders for wanders

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 129

We’ve had this mangle a few times before, but generally it has been buried in the smaller text. This instance, however, is rather blatant:

Link: Express, ‘RBS boss seems unaware of pubic opinion’

pubic opinion

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 44

Another lexical mis-selection spotted by Dr Faustus:

Link: PinkNews, ‘Avon and Somerset Police to launch new films tackling homophobic hate crime’

It is perhaps slightly worrying that the word that sprang to the writer’s mind was collusion rather than collaboration… A parapraxis?

collusion for collaboration

Not Washed or Cooked, # 141

Dr Faustus spotted this:

Link: The Guardian, ‘American doctor shot dead in Pakistan in suspected secretarian attack’

The subheading shows that the word required is sectarian, but how did the error arise? OED confirms that secretarian (equivalent to secretarial) exists, but it hasn’t been used since the early 1800s, and it is flagged as an error by WordPerfect and Word, rejected by the Blogger (Google) spellchecker, and automatically changed by Google search to sectarian.

Oddly, the URL for the page shows the correct word, not the mangle —

— which begs the question of why no-one bothered flagging and rectifying the error; but a week later the headline remains uncorrected.

Secretarian for sectarian

Double-take, # 71

Something missing here?

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Biggest ever cannabis factories found in Coventry and Warwickshire’

not the only found in

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 45

There’s a home here for that other superfluous apostrophe from last Friday. I wonder what Mr Paxman thinks about apostrophe catastrophes:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Paxman: I loathe aspects of BBC and Radio One should go’

licence fee payers money