Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 146

This error has now been corrected, but fortunately Pop Spencer had taken a screenshot:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Mauricio Pochettino […]’

He comments: ‘Reminds me of the Beatles You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away: “Here I stand, head in head…”.’
head in head

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 58

Des Pond of Slough has been using some wet and dry sandpaper that comes in various qualities:

course for coarse

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 145

It seems likely that this mangle, in the subheading of a report, arose from the writer’s later decision to insert an adjective:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Dying Art: Photographs of the Planet’s Lost and Fading Species’

As is so often the case, the adjective turns out to be superfluous.

An new exhibition

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 57

Diagnosis: optical  character recognition followed by inadequate proofreading?

Source: Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 181. Note: reprinted 2005 with slightly different layout and mangle!)

Jack for lack

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 56

Here’s a phrase that is increasing in popularity across the journalistic board:

Source: BBC News (Android), ‘EE to take over 58 Phones 4U stores’. Link: online version

Placing a company into administration for insolvency is a legal process that has to be organized. A company can thus enter administration, or go into administration, or be put or placed into administration. All these terms are used by financial professionals.

Logically, however, a company cannot fall into administration. Falling is an accidental, spontaneous action. It is thus not meaningful to apply it to the formal process of administration. To use fall not only sets up a contradiction within the phrase, but it also implies that the company has been lax in relation to its financial situation — ‘Oh heck! I’ve just noticed we’re on the edge of insolvency…’ — where it is far more likely to have been trying a range of measures short of administration to solve its problems.

It’s hard to see why this phrase came to be used.

fall into administration

Double-take, # 103

A syntactical nightmare:

Source: London Evening Standard, 11 August, 2014, p. 19. Link: online version

This is so badly phrased that it is possible to interpret it as a description of a pair of coincidental events instead of events connected as cause and effect.

The key error here is the incorrect use of the simple past instead of the pluperfect (often now called past perfect) form that is needed to demonstrate the temporal logic and relation of events. This kind of elision or oversimplification of tenses is increasing in British-English writing, perhaps influenced by films, television programmes and books from the USA, where it has been common for some time.

A ‘that’ after ‘signs’ to mark the beginning of the relative clause would also aid comprehension.

after doctors failed to spot signs he suffered a stroke

You Cannot Be Serious, # 27

From a recent BBC News report:
 

Source: BBC News (Android), ‘Gay weddings targeted for UK citizenship’. Link: Online version

Apart from the fact that the phrasing of the first sentence rather amusingly makes the process sound like a routine element of the system (‘Job description: weekly duties include stopping marriages…’), is it actually possible for an official to ‘stop a marriage’ in the way implied? One can certainly ‘prevent a wedding from taking place’, or even interrupt it so it is not formally completed (or, apparently, invalidate it by using the wrong form of words at the service), but that is not the same thing at all. A wedding is not a marriage, a marriage is not a wedding. A wedding can be prevented; a marriage is the done deal, and must be undone via some or other legal process. It cannot simply be ‘stopped’.

Home Office stops marriages on a weekly basis

Not Washed or Cooked, # 169

Spotted in Rugby by Des Pond of Slough:

Clearly composed on a word-processor, clearly not spell-checked or grammar-checked… Let’s hope the selected applicant will be police-checked…

no expereriance nessacery; childrens

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 54

Not a harmonized list:

Adult dinners; Child’s dinners

Double-take, # 102

It communicates its message, but the final phrase here struck me as odd when I first read it, in April, and every time I’ve revisited it in an attempt to decide whether or not it counts as a mangle. (It’s not helped by the fact that presumably it is not the infants who have made the choice.) Anyway, I’ve puzzled over it enough. It’s time for the world to decide!

Link: The Telegraph, ‘“Crisis” warning as up to four in 10 refused first choice primary school’

the main school of their choice

Not Washed or Cooked, # 168

That’s good, but it would be better with a spellchecker:

Link: Vine House Farm, Wild Bird Food — Suet products

potenially

You Cannot Be Serious, # 26

A soundbite from comments made by the Managing Director of Everards [sic] Brewery:

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

The Oxford Dictionaries webpage on ‘Personal pronouns’ observes that ‘[t]he correct use of personal pronouns is one of the areas of English usage that cause most difficulty’, but is concerned only with the erroneous usage of objective personal pronouns for subjective ones. The type of mangle above, where a reflexive pronoun is deployed as a subjective personal pronoun, isn’t mentioned there at all although, as this blog’s first post suggested, it is not uncommon.

Ourselves and the manager will

Double-take, # 101

The masculine pronoun in the final line here would be better replaced by the name —

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Andy Murray appears distracted as he surrenders Wimbledon title’

— but the key issue is superfluity: can one look upset other than visibly?*

* The writer seems enamoured of the phrase, which reappears — with other verbatim sections of this report — the following day in a follow-up piece.

looked visibly upset

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 53

This grammatical error would be reprehensible anywhere, but is heinous in an (apparently now defunct) academic journal. The repetition of the mangle makes it clear that it is no accident:

Link: Hulya Guney, ‘On Sartre and Self-Consciousness [sic]’, Janus Head:  Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 1.1 (1998)

two consciousness’

Singular or Plural? # 12

Grammatical-numerical confusion:

Link: The British Postal Museum & Archive, ‘ The Post Office and the First World War’

a half pence

Double-take, # 100

What can happen when a commentator on education fails to check for sense before posting:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Please, Sir! Why is my son reading a crisp packet for homework?’

The earlier text has indeed focussed on the writer’s son, but the paragraph directly before this one refers to both children, so the sudden reference to the daughter results in a nonsense. One might also raise an eyebrow at the final sentence since there has been only one recent plural noun and thus the pronoun they seems to be referring to the Doritos…

My daughter aged 11 is given three minutes of homework a week. One weekend he told me…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 167

Dr Faustus was puzzled to receive an email notification of the following temporary employment:

Despite the French headers here, the rest of the email is in English. Unitemps is based at the University of Warwick and operates on a franchise model elsewhere in the UK. Spell-checking facilities are routinely included with email applications, and the email’s bilinguality should not cause confusion since the French word for the Thai language is thai. Zéro point!

Thair interpreter

Double-take, # 99

On the face of it, this headline is offering bad advice:

Sources: The Sunday Times, ‘Money’ section, 7 September 2014, p. 6

The online version makes more sense:

Link: The Sunday Times

Not the same message at all.
Don’t write a will, all you’re likely to leave behind is confusion

Double-take, # 98

Pop Spencer has sent in another oddly-phrased headline:

Link: Northampton Chronicle and Echo, ‘One in five […]

He commented: ‘When I saw this headline my first thought was that the patients had been slapped around a bit, or taken out to the pub. Anything but what was expected. Or am I wrong?’

patients not treated as expected within 62 days of diagnosis

Double-take, # 97

Dr Faustus submitted this mangle —

Link: The Past Speaks blog, ‘Perspectives on the Evolution of States, Markets, and Economic Culture’

— with the comment: ‘Well, is it or isn’t it?’ It’s a fair point and I think we should be plainly told.

Two sentences later, I was surprised to learn that the length of the US states is relevant in politics…

Since the entry has been provided specifically ‘for the benefit of […] Canadian readers’, perhaps the term ‘blank cheque’, with its UK spelling, isn’t the most helpful analogy. Or is it?
is isn’t; written constitutions, unlike US states, some of which are very lengthy; ‘blank cheque’ [for Canadian readers?]

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 55

Surely one of the most mangled sentences in the history of journalism — and that’s before the climactic and archaic gerund:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Judge condemns Crown Prosecution Service for pursuing sex case’

grinded; ‘spooning’

Double-take, # 96

From Des Pond of Slough from yesterday’s BBC News website:

The subheading failed to improve matters — rather the reverse, in fact:

As Des says: ‘What does “anniversary” mean?’ Someone at the Beeb noticed or was told, as both mangles had been corrected by 9.35am, but they should never have been there at all.
six-month anniversary

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 144

Not sure where Dr Faustus found this, but it seems to be someone’s official documentation:

If you go to position 5.26 on this YouTube compilation from It’ll Be Alright [sic] on the Night, you can see Paul Hogan being similarly challenged by the word…

larger for lager

Double-take, # 95

(Confusing) information for tourists:

Link: ChampsElysees-Paris,.com, Le Drugstore Publicis

Grocery… is what closes the drugstore

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 143

These are the opening two paragraphs from a MailOnline report:

Link: MailOnline: ‘Teenage girl, 18, racks up £1,158 phone bill […]’

The the horror of her mother

Double-take, # 94

This mangle results from modern technological methods — a technomangle, perhaps — since it’s a direct consequence of the longer headlines facilitated by internet publishing. I had planned to post the report to my Facebook stream, but then I noticed what happened to the headline on the preview and decided it deserved a space here:

Link: The Independent, ‘Half of young women unable to “locate vagina” and 65% find it difficult to say the word’

Half of young women unable to ‘locate vagina’ and 65% find it

Adjectival Confusion, # 3

This piece of news (reproduced here from the Independent’s website, which is showing a video clip from London Live showing a headline from the Mail Online) is all over the media at the moment, together with its bizarre phrasing:

Link: The Independent, ‘Hacker leaks “nude photos of celebrities” — London Live’

Photographs of nude celebrities might justly cause consternation, but what is a ‘nude photo’?

nude photos of celebrities

Not Washed or Cooked, # 166

Des Pond of Slough found today’s mangle on this year’s Heritage Open Days webpages. Presumably, it exactly reproduces material supplied by the venue, which is odd since this is a word much used in the theatre:

Link: Heritage Open Days, Royal and Derngate Theatres

rehersal

Singular or Plural? # 11

The reversal of the standard subject—verb order, coupled with the lengthy subordinate clause, may have confused matters in this sentence, whose main subject and verb do not agree:

George Ritzer, ‘Introduction’ to Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. by Chris Turner (London, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi: Sage, 1998), p. 16. Link: GoogleBooks

Within his body of thought on consumption […] is Baudrillard’s ideas

Not Washed or Cooked, # 165

Dr Faustus spotted this mangle on the BBC’s news ticker at the beginning of last month. It shouldn’t be a surprise, since this is how everyone seems to pronounce the word these days (rhyming with fleece, of course, not with lice):

The same mangle was tweeted by BBC Breaking News.
plice