Apostrophe catastrophe, # 65

Singer-songwriter Ian Bourne posted to Facebook this extract from an unsolicited invitation he’d been sent, and kindly agreed to let me use it on the blog:

The first paragraph’s apostrophe catastrophe has a stylistically and grammatically dubious set of supporters, notably the arbitrary and sometimes bizarre capitalization throughout the text, the odd use of inverted commas in the second paragraph, and the multiple exclamation marks after ‘NOW’.

haven’t; random capitalization; our ‘one time’ registration

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 64

Following on from last Thursday’s heinous mangle in which a Rugby librarian had copied a book’s title, but added an apostrophe, here’s the Simply Entertainment cataloguer copying a programme title, but excising the apostrophe clearly and correctly shown on the DVD box:

Source: Simply Entertainment, August 2014, p. 40

Devils Whore

Double-take, # 116

A missed-out word results in gibberish:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘The £65m cuts no-one in Coventry will be able to escape’

to hurt almost single person

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 63

Des Pond of Slough finds a hideous mangle in the window of Rugby Library:

Coal Merchant’s of Rugby

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 62

A governmental object lesson in why English teaching needs to be improved:

Link: Twitter, DCMS

your businesses broadband

Not Washed or Cooked, # 182

Kicking off Mangling English’s Christmas is this gem from Phil Vivian, who comments: ‘My good deed for the day: pointing out to the supervisor in Tesco that they might not sell too many of these. That said, I suppose that they could be targeting a very specific type of customer, perhaps one contemplating marriage with a pre-nuptial agreement as part of the deal.’

financee

Not Washed or Cooked, # 181

This can presently be seen among similar (if unmangled) home-produced announcements decorating the shopfront of a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine in South Kensington:

specilise

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 61

So many correct plurals; but then it all went wrong:

Link: Rugby Observer, 7 August 2014, p. 6, and online

conservatory’s

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 60

Ouch!

Source: Simply Entertainment, August 2014, p. 5

All Our Yesterday’s

You Cannot Be Serious, # 31

A barely-believable mangle from the smartphone of Dr Faustus proves to be faithfully reproduced on the main website:

Cf. online: PinkNews, ‘Twickenham rugby fans accused […]’

homohpboic

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 65

‘There’s a mangle,’ said Des Pond of Slough, ‘they’ve put Devizes by mistake.’ That was how I heard it, but actually…

Link: Rugby Observer, 16 October 2014, advertising wrapper

… it turned out not to be Devizes for devises, but devises for devices — more heinous, of course, since they aren’t actually homophonic.

devises for devices

Double-take, # 115

A still-uncorrected error from last Friday’s online Express:

Link: Express, ‘Shoppers ordered to kneel on floor […]’

Mo Juste, who spotted the mangle, comments: ‘A despicable crime, indeed, but they’ll probably slip through the net quite easily.’

The report contains several other oddities, such as describing the malefactors as ‘balaclava-bearing’, which implies that they were carrying rather than wearing the headgear; and reporting an eyewitness as suggesting that the culprits ‘psyche [sic] themselves up on adrenaline’.

viscous thugs; psyche for psych; balaclava-bearing

Double-take, # 114

The verb, but not the inadequate punctuation, has been corrected since Des Pond of Slough spotted this last Friday morning:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Rosetta Mission: What Can They Do to Save Philae?’

The Rosetta mission team is facing a race against time to save the probe, here is the options

Double-take, # 113

This recently arrived through Des Pond of Slough’s door:

manangement

You Cannot Be Serious, # 30

From a Travelodge poster on the London Underground:

Oxford Dictionaries confirms that this spelling hasn’t been acceptable since the Middle Ages, and proves a brief history of the word and its relation to until. (Unfortunately, its own examples of abbreviated usage include an open inverted comma in place of an apostrophe…) Oddly, both MS Word and Corel WordPerfect include til in their spelling dictionaries, although Word does flag it as an error if the US-English dictionary is selected.

til for till

Not Washed or Cooked, # 180

This, spotted on a Facebook stream yesterday, seems to be part of an awareness campaign by a new social platform:

 

A sound sentiment, and self-promotion by making members use competitors’ apparatus (‘like and share’) is clever, but the mangles hardly inspire confidence. Investigating further, I located the website, only to be faced with this on the homepage:

This is clear as far as ‘members’ and again from ‘by sharing’; but what does the bit in the middle mean?

becuse; explioting; + gibberish

Not Washed or Cooked, # 179

As promised yesterday, the second of two mangles spotted on a recent episode of BBC 1’s Watchdog, this time on a segment introducing a service offered by Moonpig.com:

Source: BBC 1 Watchdog, series 34, episode 2 (23 October 2014), at approximately 51 minutes

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You Cannot Be Serious, # 29

The first, and worse, of two mangles from BBC 1’s Watchdog a couple of weeks ago. This is a detail of a tee-shirt specially made for a ‘rogue trader’ exposed on the programme:

Source: BBC 1 Watchdog, series 34, episode 2 (23 October 2014), and online: ‘UK Damp and Decay Control - part 4’

This mangling of the Gospel of John, 8:7, is hideous, but certainly isn’t unique. For instance, ‘Let he who is without sin’ is the title of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, series 5, episode 7. However, the Star Trek franchise has never set itself up as an authority on English grammar, unlike the BBC, which offers English courses for children and adults, but doesn’t seem to require its staff to lead by example  or, where necessary, take a remedial course.

The phrase suffers from hypercorrection, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as ‘[t]he use of an erroneous word form or pronunciation based on a false analogy with a correct or prestigious form, such as the use of I instead of me as a grammatical object (as in he invited my husband and I to lunch)’.
Let he who is without sin

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 64

A confusing proposition from The Independent:

Link: The Independent, ‘Man banned from entering park on his own because of paedophile fears’

While the headline is clear, the report’s opening sentence suggests that the entry criteria are based on marital and parental status rather than immediate circumstances. In fact, the man who was denied entry is a parent (another piece of mangled English: ‘The grandfather and father of three grown up children’), which sets up a contradiction with the opening statement since he is likely to be married, divorced or widowed rather than ‘single’. Presumably the writer meant lone men or women unaccompanied by a child.

banning single men or women without children

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 154

The printed Daily Telegraph marks Warwick University’s exoneration and reinstatement of Professor Thomas Docherty with a missing word:

Source: The Daily Telegraph, 25 October 2014, p. 17

The online text differs syntactically and thus avoids the omission; Docherty is referred to as ‘the English and Comparative Literature professor’, which avoids the need for an of. The reasons for the difference in capitalization are not obvious.

professor English

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 153

This was submitted by Mo Juste in mid-October, but the error has still not been corrected:

Link: BBC iPlayer Radio, Feedback (10 October, 2014)

30 day

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 59

Spotted by Des Pond of Slough:

I wonder if andrewlomas is pleased that Lidl is showing the world his apostrophe catastrophe. I also wonder whether andrewlomas exists or is a marketing creation. I don’t wonder about the apostrophe catastrophe. That definitely exists.

better than it’s price tag

Double-take, # 112

A glaring typographical error is compounded by a very odd construction. I can’t find a source that refers to this noun being adopted as a verb, although it can be used as an adjective:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘How to boutique you home [sic]’

How to boutique you home

Multimangle, # 11

Inventing a new verb is just the beginning…

Link: Headmasters Birmingham, ‘How to Classic French Braid Your Hair (Video)’

It’s not the end of the world if hair stylists can’t spell or punctuate correctly, or if they mistake their there for their their. After all, that isn’t what the customer is paying for. However, it’s plain that someone has put a good deal of thought into making this website aesthetically pleasing, and it’s sad that the design is compromised by mangles that could easily have been avoided by running the text through a spelling and grammar checker.

platt for plait; to classic french braid; there for their; acheive; stylists work; of for for; department are; within for in

Double-take, # 111

Here’s a mangle from yesterday’s Guardian. It’s an article headline, ‘the one part you’d think they’d get right,’ comments contributor Mo Juste. Given the generous print size, it is indeed surprising that no-one noticed before it was too late:

Source: The Guardian, ‘The time has come time to slow down immigration’, ‘Journal’ section, p. 33

The headline of the online version seems not to have contained the error, even on initial publication.
The time has come time to slow down immigration

Double-take, # 110

It’s not until the end of this text, when potential female customers are presented as an afterthought, that the reader realizes that the product is intended only for men. From the mangling perspective, the problem is the ambiguity arising from the failure to insert a word after the final possessive noun:

Source: Sunday Times Magazine, 26 October 2014, p. 24

Women’s what? Shops? Sizes? Dreams? Not well conceived. At least there’s an apostrophe, which can’t be said for the company website’s use of the same word and its male equivalent:

Link: Berghaus

available in women’s. mens womens

Double-take, # 109

William Shelton sends this, remarking: ‘Someone in marketing obviously skipped a lesson in English before creating the name of this Brazilian condom.’

Link: Sex Free Preservativos

In a secondary twist, the name also manages to imply that the company will be giving the product away…

Sex Free Preservativos

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 58

From a brochure:

Source: Coopers of Stortford brochure, p. 39. Cf. online

worlds’ best

Double-take, # 108

Des Pond of Slough asks (rhetorically), ’Why the question mark?‘

Link: The Warwick Courier, ‘We Still Want Answers Say Warwick Townfolk’

The answer, of course, is that the writer doesn’t really understand the difference between direct and reported speech.

reported question – with question mark

Singular or Plural? # 13

We haven’t featured this mangle since March 2013, but its repeated use on the Nationwide Building Society’s website shows that it hasn’t gone away. Here’s one example:

Link: Nationwide, ‘Savings’

criteria applies