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