Not Washed or Cooked, # 225

An insensitive typographical error spotted by Dr Faustus:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Sir Christopher Bayly obituary’

The headline formulation is sloppy too: ‘obituary’ either needs to be made a content-type heading (Sir Christopher Bayly: Obituary or Obituary: Sir Christopher Bayly) or the text rephrased to make the term sound less like part of the man’s name (Obituary of Sir Christopher Bayly) — and when did academic professional titles cease to take initial capitals?

profressor

Not Washed or Cooked, # 224

Not, despite the headline (see link below), a continuation of yesterday’s food theme, but Independent carelessness renaming a London Borough:

Link: The Independent, ‘Jeremy Paxman gets grilled […]’

Kensigton

Not Washed or Cooked, # 223

Fun with food… First, a typographical error adjacent to the correctly-spelt packet (spelling, but not punctuation, now corrected):

Link: Coles, Maggi ‘One Pan: Chicken Pumpkin & Spinch Risotto Meal Base’

Some rather insistent misspelling:

Link: Toledo News Now, ‘Grilled Rack of Veal […]’

spinch; spinich

Not Washed or Cooked, # 222

Today’s mangle is a variant of yesterday’s, but even more heinous given the source — don’t miss the publication’s tagline — and the fact that the error has stood uncorrected for over four years:

Link: The Norway Post, ‘Norwgian air base in Scotland?’

Norwgian for Norwegian

Not Washed or Cooked, # 221

A world news publication should carefully check its country-based spellings:

Link: World Bulletin (Turkey), Norwagian candidate wants mosque to increase immigration

Norwagian for Norwegian

Not Washed or Cooked, # 220

Here, the writer’s fingers may simply have followed a familiar routine, resulting — in the absence of spell-checking and proofreading — in something quite odd:

Link: Herald Sun (Melbourne), ‘Australian men’s basketball team crush Finalnd […]’

Finalnd for Finland

Mangling Meaning, # 29

It would seem that over-excitement has once again affected The Independent’s ability to construct a coherent and grammatically-correct sentence. It was going so well, too:

Link: The Independent, ‘Richard Hammond “gutted” about Jeremy Clarkson sacking […]’

he left the possibility of him and May continuing without Clarkson

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 80

Dr Faustus found this on Amazon:

Link: Amazon.co.uk, Marguerite Duras, The Lover, ‘From the Back Cover’

Despite appearing in the ‘From the back cover’ section of the page, the mangle is not the publisher’s, as a screenshot of the back cover on Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature shows:

Investigation has not revealed the origin of the error, which seems to date back several years, but it has certainly been disseminated widely over the Internet.

Link: Google search for "frances coveted prix goncourt"

Frances’ coveted Prix Goncourt

Double-take, # 148

This comes from Just Liam:

He remarks: ‘Tell me if I’m wrong, but I don’t want to be sexuring any candles if I’m not supposed to be doing so.’ Indeed. I wonder if the ambiguous capitalized instruction is intended to work as a subliminal message…

sexure for secure

You Cannot Be Serious, # 44

This mangle has already been featured a few times and, as before, it’s the source of the error that makes it particularly reprehensible. This one, contributed by Dr Faustus, comes from a closed questionnaire on the website of an academic publisher:

less for fewer

Multimangle, # 15

Another contribution from Dr Faustus. This press release, reproduced verbatim on the Coombe Monthly website, offers a confusion of dates, some odd diction and punctuation, and, as both heading and subject line, a couple of nasty apostrophe catastrophes:

The Lib-Dems have sold us out, we need a workers MP on a workers wage; TUSC supporters held a protest yesterday (Monday 4 April) to protest […]; email date 7 April, press release date 7 March

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 177

Dr Faustus has sent this extract from an emailed recruitment circular, which demonstrates a failure to proofread, an absence of logical hyphenation and an abrupt shift in perspective:

a supervisors; third person to second person shift

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 176

A slip on the keyboard, and no checking for mangles:

Link: The Independent, ‘easyJet apologises after calling customer’s lawyer a “motherf****r”’

easyJets aid for easy said

Not Washed or Cooked, # 219

From the menu at a recent conference at Warwick University (‘Warwick Conferences — Conference with Confidence’): 

creme Brulees with biscotti buiscuits; Galzed strawberry tartlets

Not Washed or Cooked, # 218

A lackadaisical approach to spell-checking and proofreading from the nPower blog:

Link: nPower blog (1 February, 2013), ‘Ever wondered how much your appliances cost to run?’

etimates

Mangling Meaning, # 28

The odd phrasing here leads to an unlikely, unpleasant and erroneous premise:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Husband and wife found dead in suspected murder-suicide’

The combination of ‘is accused’ and ‘before’ suggests a cause and effect scenario which is not — this being journalism — negated by the shift of tense from the headline to the subhead. Someone who is dead cannot be ‘accused’ in the sense of being charged with an offence; but the only other meaning of the word (see Oxford Dictionaries), to claim someone has done something wrong, is also illogical: as the circumstances are as yet uncertain, it cannot be firmly asserted that events transpired as stated here. Perhaps the writer should have changed the verb and used one of those spare allegedlys from last week.

A […] man is accused of killing his 73-year-old wife in the bedroom before taking his own life

Double-take, # 147

A misunderstanding, one hopes:

ground nut oil

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 79

Yesterday’s missing apostrophe may have ended up here, in a mangle spotted by Des Pond of Slough:

Link: BBC News, ‘Charge over Coventry police car brick attack’

due before Coventry Magistrates’ on 28 May

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 78

From a smartphone BBC News report comes a missing apostrophe, and a puzzle: why use single quotation marks in the headline and doubles in the subhead? The online version has no subhead, but it too nonsensically varies its quotation marks with singles in the headline and doubles in the body of the piece…

Source: BBC News for smartphone

pounds worth + interchangeable single & double quotation marks

Double-take, # 146

There seems to be much uncertainty in this report’s opening paragraph:

Link: The Independent, ‘Man allegedly stabs two people at Detroit bus stop after asking if they were Muslims’

The phrase ‘according to a report’ surely negates the need for any expression of allegation, never mind two of them (plus another in the unwieldy headline).

2x allegedly + 1 in headline

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 175

From Unintended Saucy Humour comes an uncorrected typographical error in the penultimate line of this extract. Close by, an adjective is incorrectly being used as a noun, which is especially odd given that it is clearly understood as an adjective in the article’s title and that the noun form exists:

Link: Donald W. Katzner, ‘A Neoclassical Curmudgeon Looks at Heterodox Criticisms of Microeconomics’,  World Economic Review, 4 (2015), 63–75 (p. 64)

quiet for quite; neoclassical as noun

Not Washed or Cooked, # 217

A(nother) failure to spellcheck or proofread by the financial experts at The Sunday Times:

Link: The Sunday Times, ‘Property v shares: the big debate for investors’

but-to-let; futher

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 174

A messy piece of prose, found by Dr Faustus:

Link: Julia H. Chang, ‘In Defense of Theory’, The Chronicle of Higher Education (5 September, 2014)

The substitution of a preposition for a conjunction in the middle sentence shows that the writing has not been adequately proofread; but there are problems with the syntax in the opening sentence too. As it stands, the way the first sentence is phrased — ‘As a student, I recall feeling empowered when reading’ — implies that the writer is presently a student, looking back on the effect of recent reading. However, the final sentence, with its reference to ‘many of my own students’, indicates that this is not the case, and the writer is later identified as an ‘assistant professor’. The opening phrase that modifies the ‘I’ and the present participle both need to be altered, and the sentence reordered, to represent the facts accurately: ‘I recall feeling empowered when, as a student, I read’.

by for but; ‘As a student, I recall feeling empowered when reading’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 216

Dr Faustus has found a nasty vowel substitution and some odd punctuation on the Aer Lingus website:

Link: Aerlingus.com, ‘Cheap flights from Edinburgh to Dublin’

indicitive

You Cannot Be Serious, # 43

This substitution of an adverb for a relative pronoun reads oddly:

Link: The Sunday Times, ‘Healthcare system is in need of a cure’

to where for to which

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 173

Easter brings this oddity:

Link: West Tennessee Examiner, ‘Provocative and radial stage play […]’

radial for radical

Double-take, # 145

A nasty case, including singular-as-plural, a syntactical minefield, and some punctuation overkill:

Source: Rugby Observer (20 November, 2014), p. 16, and online

Are your agency […]?? [PMP Recruitment]

You Cannot Be Serious, # 42

If you’ve ever wondered how all those inked mangles arise, this is from an advertisement for a new tattoo shop in Rugby:

Source: Rugby Observer (19 March 2015), p. 3, and online

sureley, Tattoo’s & Artist’s [as plurals]; insuring for ensuring; random capitalization; punctuation problems

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 76

As Des Pond of Slough said, today’s mangle provides ‘Buckets of meaninglessness’:

Link: BBC iWonder, ‘How are serial killers caught?’ (6: ‘Debunking myths’)

Also notable is the byline, which states that the piece was not written, but ‘Authored by’ one John Bennett. The BBC’s iWonder (or, according to its logo, iW?nder) project was launched in March 2014 and was heavily trailed on BBC television. On launch day, the BBC’s internet blog explained: ‘BBC iWonder is a new factual and educational brand from the BBC, and it’s all about feeding the UK’s curiosity.’

pail into insignificance; authored by

Double-take, # 144

Des Pond of Slough spotted this amusing mangle in a BBC News breadcrumb:

Link: BBC News, ‘Apple boss Tim Cook “to donate millions” to charity’

$800 fortune