Double-take, # 79

More duplication (not to mention decidedly inelegant syntax) found by Dr Faustus:

Link: BBC News, ‘Gove rebuts claims of American author ban’

To Kill a Mockingbird Bird

Double-take, # 78

Dr Faustus has found a paragraph with a much-mangled main clause:

Link: WalesOnline, ‘Under Milk Wood: 7 things to look for as film hits BBC Four’

the first first chance viewers from across the UK the first time it will have been broadcast

Not Washed or Cooked, # 148

Dr Faustus presents… struggles with a spacebar:

Source: BBC News (tablet edition), ‘Oakeshott quits Lib Dems with Clegg “disaster” warning’ — Analysis section

Most of the errors have been corrected on the webpage version, although hyphens still represent dashes and the first erroneous space remains. News Sniffer hosts a souvenir of the mangled version.

spacebar issues: Oakeshott ’s parting shot; Bu the suggests; four polls."Even if; yesterday- when

Double-take, # 77

Pop Spencer came upon this:

Link: Groupon, ‘Personalised Acrylic Photo Print in Choice of Sizes […]’

You can imagine the discussion.

‘Now, when you create the webpage, you need to put in eight points about the product — it’s got to be eight, OK?’
‘But there aren’t eight things on this list.’
‘Well, rejig one of them a bit and stick it in again. No-one’ll notice.’

I’m not convinced by ‘shiny appearance’ either: isn’t ‘shiny’ self-evidently linked to ‘appearance’?

duplication (Resistant to light and water/light and water resistant) & redundancy (Shiny appearance

Right word, wrong form, # 2

Link: The University of Iowa Info Center [sic], ‘Creating a “White List” in Eudora — Article 2746’

It seems strange that a different method needs to be found then… Did the writer mean ‘daunting’? undaunting for daunting

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 48

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Celia Walden has a little work done’

Having featured this mangle on January 27 and 28 this year, I had started to wonder how widespread it is: the instances I’d found (of which I included only a small sample) suggested it was an error localized to North America and South Africa. Today’s example, however, was printed in a British publication and is by a British writer, Celia Walden. According to her profile on her agent’s website, Walden was educated at Westminster School and Cambridge University, so really has no excuse for making errors like this.

taught for taut (reprise)

Not Washed or Cooked, # 147

Dr Faustus spotted a classic mangle outside the British Museum:

Univeristy of London

Singular or Plural? # 7

For no reason that I can discern, various writers have recently acquired a habit of harnessing a singular verb to a subject made up of two clearly disparate nouns connected with the conjunction and, thus:

Link: The Sunday Times, breadcrumb — quotation from ‘Table Talk: Beast, London W1’

In addition to ignoring the basic principle of grammatical number, upon which the authorities and textbooks seem to be in agreement, a combination of this kind disrupts the flow by creating confusion in the reader. Are both nouns supposed to be there, or has something gone wrong in the editing process? If the writer had intended to remove one of the nouns, which one? The questions are unanswerable, but the reader is now distracted and, depending on the type of work, may even have lost confidence in the writer’s authority.

The tendency is becoming more widespread in journalism, and it occurs habitually in some students’ written work. This suggests either that the error is being transmitted at school by certain teachers who themselves misunderstand the grammar, or that the error is not been flagged, possibly because of the modern practice of correcting only a quota of mistakes in written work.

the expense and value is

Double-take, # 76

Sport again today, this time tennis. Here, courtesy of Dr Faustus, is a verbal slip in a BBC report of Simona Halep’s comments on her defeat by Maria Sharapova in the French Open:

Link: BBC Sport, ‘French Open: Maria Sharapova proud of “amazing” clay victory’

As Dr Faustus points out, ‘It’s not clear whether the error was made by Halep herself (speaking), by the transcriber, or by the journalist, or all three.’ It is clear, however, that it should have been spotted in the editing or proofreading process and removed before publication.

that moments

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 47

Pop Spencer has submitted a topical mangle:

Link: MirrorOnline, World Cup 2014, ‘England’s World Cup loss […]’

I see this error quite often in publications and in students’ essays, and it seems not to be confined to a particular area or even country of origin. The fact that some writers insert then for than more than once — in some cases, several times — in a single work suggests that it cannot always be dismissed as a typographical error or other accidental slip, but is, in some cases at least, a misusage that should have been corrected at some point.

I’ve not so far come across the reverse error, than for then.

then for than

Not Washed or Cooked, # 146

New contributor Just Nick has found this gem, whose excessive punctuation is unlikely to be an ironic comment on the mangle:

Link: The Beechwood Hotel — Restaurant

The page does not improve as it continues:

Sic. Or perhaps sic!!!
comming; our selves; unfinished text

Not Washed or Cooked, # 145

Another unconvincing scam from my mailbox, this one a fail from its subject line:

Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Christian calendar, and we have a bonus: some mangled Latin. This unfortunate error is found in a misrepresentation of the title of a section of a hymn, ‘Sacris solemniis’, written for the occasion by St Thomas Aquinas:

Link: YouTube, ‘C Franck Penis angelicus Ave Maria Archikatedra we Fromborku’

The penis here is clearly misplaced: Aquinas is not concerned with angels’ genitals, but with their bread (panis).

recived + Penis angelicus