Other Englishes, # 2

Following on from yesterday’s scam email, here is a second, showing another familiar set of errors, such as stilted syntax, the omission of direct and indirect articles, or use of an incorrect article, and the omission of a letter at the end of a word that results in a spell-checker appeasing preposition instead of the intended noun:

missing/incorrect articles (Natwest Online Banking team; introduce new much secured …] process; you are the member of our online banking); simple for filling procedure; you can get advantage

Other Englishes, # 1

The first of two days of lovely scam emails. Such scams are another reason (if one were needed) to teach, learn and use good English, and to read properly instead of skim, so that recipients can determine when they are being scammed; this is especially important when scammers’ offerings are made to look convincing with logos and apparently official email addresses:

As is often the case, the key errors in this email are verb tenses and grammatical number, although there are some odd prepositions here too, and ’prevent’ has been used as if it were a direct synonym of ’protect’.

by for from [x2]; introduce for [has] introduced; prevent for protect; restore for restored; remove for removed; field for fields

Double-take, # 180

This pair of mangles (and some dubious punctuation) comes from an estate agents’ description of a property:

Link: Rightmove, Edward Knight (Elizabeth Way, Long Lawford, Rugby, Warwickshire)

is two sheds and a green house; punctuation

Double-take, # 179

Another via John Holloway, ‘from the Internet somewhere’. Apart from the random capitalization, the list proceeds well until close to the end, when much becomes mangled:

driver … weighs up to 44 tonnes; random capitalization; punctuation; weights for weighs

You Cannot Be Serious, # 54

Another via John Holloway, from North Walls. The sign might have benefited from more punctuation and less random capitalization, but it’s the bottom line that is particularly mangled:

you for your

Double-take, # 178

John Holloway seems to have been doing an online quiz. It’s hard to tell whether the included mangle is a misspelling or a typographical error:

Link: Quizopolis, ‘The Archers Brian Aldridge Trivia’

Hungry for Hungary

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 88

Via John Holloway, an entry from an online school directory which persistently presents the school’s name incorrectly, although the school’s own included graphic shows the correct form… twice:

Link: UK Schools & Colleges Database, ‘Murrays Road School’

John points out that ‘the name of the road (and therefore of the school) is Murray’s Road, with an apostrophe’. The directory is not the only place where confusion over the apostrophe arises. A report in IOM Today of the school’s proposed amalgamation with the infants’ school that feeds it shows the apostrophe in the text, but not in the photograph’s caption.

Murrays School for Murray’s School (x3)

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 87

Via John Holloway, a missing apostrophe and a missing space:

Stewards Flat; Thankyou

You Cannot Be Serious, # 53

Pairing nicely with yesterday’s bit of grammatical hideousness is this mangled on-set television guide entry contributed by John Holloway:

I’m not sure where the various schedulers obtain the programme information, but presumably the synopsis is supplied by the programme-makers. Coast is a collaboration between the Open University and BBC Productions, Birmingham.

sunk for sank

You Cannot Be Serious, # 52

I have one answer, but it is nothing to do with the subject of the article…

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Camila Batmanghelidjh and the rise of the egotistical altruist’

If Wikipedia is correct in stating that this writer attended schools in Kew and Kensington, and then went to University College London (UCL), the mangle cannot be excused as a dialectal variant or idiosyncracy.

drank for drunk

You Cannot Be Serious, # 51

This pair of adjacent Twitter posts fits nicely into an ongoing thread (here and in discussion on the blog’s Facebook page) on notional agreement, most recently featured last weekend. The contributor, Des Pond of Slough, comments: ‘At least they’re consistent. Kinda sorta.’

Link: Twitter.com, Warwickshire Police, 20 August 2015

unit have; are one

Double-take, # 177

As Des Pond of Slough points out, the rather odd product name is only the beginning of the delights of this box of goodies, which he spotted in a Coventry branch of Aldi. Particularly noteworthy are the description of the product (at the lower right of the display packaging) and the rather strange wording in the circular flag next to the cowboy on the product box:

snack’n play [or snack’ n play?]; check backside for more fun; Hazelnuts spread and breadsticks with surprise

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 196

Krissie Pearse has submitted this rather pleasing mangle:

Link: Digital Journal, ‘Pollution from mine worse than previously estimated: EPA’

emails for miles

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 195

Fairly hot on the heels of a contribution by Dr Faustus, demonstrating a failure to proofread a report of a tragedy before uploading, comes a BBC News breadcrumb, via Des Pond of Slough, featuring the same basic typographical error:

The phrase is correct in the main report, but this may, of course, have been altered.

casual for causal

Double-take, # 176

Page 80 of the Magazine supplement of last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph:

The mangle was discovered at some point, as the corresponding webpage announces:

Link: Telegraph, ‘Horoscopes […] for the week of Saturday 15th August to Friday 21st August’

Dummy copy dummy copy

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 194

Here, via Dr Faustus, is another mangle that only proofreading would flag:

Link: Wikipedia.org, ‘Constitution of the United Kingdom’

statue for statute

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 193

This mangle from Dr Faustus shows a mispositioned space resulting in nonsensical text, despite the fact that the words exist. Some might find the use, in the same sentence, of a singular noun with plural pronoun and verb to be on the borderline of grammatical acceptability as notional agreement:

Link: Channel 5, Suspects

behind the mall the way; team show

Multimangle, # 24

Here, via Dr Faustus, is a much and variously mangled blurb for the SWLondoner [sic]:

Link: SWLondoner, ‘Read the July edition of South West Londoner packed with news, features and entertainment’

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 192

A spell-checker wouldn’t have identified this as an error and the writer seems not to have checked the text, as Dr Faustus discovered:

Link: PinkNews, ‘Poll finds that same-sex marriage was most popular Tory policy’

fond for found

Not Washed or Cooked, # 247

This error, contributed by Dr Faustus, was presumably corrected on the main publicity page after the mangled version had been supplied to the university’s purchase pages:

Source: University College London (UCL), online store (http://onlinestore.ucl.ac.uk/)

(The course dates having passed, the dedicated purchase page has been taken down.)
theLondonarea

You Cannot Be Serious, # 50

More from Dr Faustus, who observed a problem with a preposition in this so-called ‘analysis’, by a ‘business correspondent’, of the Bank of England’s accidentally leaked plan to prepare an emergency strategy to leave the European Union. Prepositions, however, appear to be of lesser concern than the overall expression. Much of this ponderously whimsical piece of writing demonstrates problems in selecting logical and harmonious verb forms, while the second paragraph seems confused about whether it is asking or reporting a question:

Link: BBC News, ‘Email mistake reveals Bank of England's EU exit project’

logic & harmony of tenses; First of all we’d ask why do we pay these people to react rather than pre-empt massive outcomes. Secondly it might have already been too late; [&c]

Not Washed or Cooked, # 246

Another mangle via Dr Faustus. An Internet search shows that this is a fairly common typographical error, but any spell-checker should pick it up as it is not actually a word:

Link: Daily Mail, ‘Teacher feared to be second Briton kidnapped […]’

grappline for grappling

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 88

Another homophonic mix-up from Dr Faustus:

Link: BBC News, ‘South Africa train crash […]’

The BBC’s error, as so often, has been widely disseminated on the Internet.
stationery for stationary

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 87

Dr Faustus has submitted this homophonic mangle, which is a fairly common error and which the blog has featured a few times. There is also a split infinitive, which some find inelegant at best, and the clarity of ‘support shirts’ seems dubious — support stockings I’ve heard of, but not shirts:

Link: The Huffington Post, ‘School Backtracks After Suspending Student […]’

principle for principal; support shirts; to automatically expel

Double-take, # 175

Dr Faustus has submitted this for the grammatical hideousness in the ‘If’ clause (actually not one, since it lacks a verb; it has now been corrected). However, since the item comes from ‘a magazine for the global citizen’, not a dedicated marketing publication, the jargonistic phrase ‘Customer Reactions’ seems inappropriate, as well as ungrammatical: the relation between the nouns should be shown by a possessive form. The opening paragraph revisits the ‘Nestlé problem’ mentioned earlier this week:

Link: Good, ‘Naked People Took Over a Coffee Shop […]’

your for you’re; ‘Customer Reactions’; Nestle for Nestlé

Multimangle, # 23

No-one seems to have proofread this text (contributed by Dr Faustus), which comes from the Best Western Hotel, Findlater Place, Dublin:

pre authorisation (x4); Pre authorisation are; thought for though

Double-take, # 174

An excerpt from a much longer email received by Dr Faustus:

update your website in low fee; Greetings of the day!!; we serve more than innumerable companies ; unbelievably pocket friendly prices

You Cannot Be Serious, # 49

Dr Faustus observes that the BBC seems to be suffering from inconsistency in relation to a company name in this report, shifting between plain and possessive forms (the latter being incorrect). I’m inclined to add, forty-two years on from the UK joining the EEC and twenty-two years into its EU membership, that it is high time the British press learned that the final letter of Nestlé takes an acute accent — if other nations’ print and web media can accommodate diacritical marks, why can‘t the UK’s? Most companies, these two included, have an Internet presence nowadays, so there can be no excuse for not checking and using their correct names. There’s also a typographical error resulting in the wrong word (which a spell-checker wouldn’t find, but proofreading would, or should). Yet another mangle here is the omission of a possessive in the first line of the second paragraph, which refers specifically to the opinion of the presiding (and correctly unhyphenated) advocate general (compare ‘the judge’s opinion’ rather than ‘the judge opinion’) and not, as it is made to seem here, a particular kind of general opinion:

Link: BBC News, ‘Nestle faces setback in KitKat trademark battle’

Cadbury & Cadbury’s; Nestle; advocate-general opinion

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 191

Dr Faustus has sent in this unfortunate BBC mangle, snapped from a smartphone. The report on the BBC webpage is phrased very differently, but a Google search suggests that the errors originated in a news feed issued by the BBC:

causalities for casualities; in on

Double-take, # 173

Received from Unitemps by Dr Faustus, and not mangling English so much as mangling in English. It certainly seems confused about how to express times, or at least how to express them consistently:

07:45am – 4:15pm OR 08:30am – 18:00pm

Double-take, # 172

A Dr Faustus find, now corrected:

Link: The British Museum, ‘Indigenous Australia’ exhibition

is be