You Cannot Be Serious, # 7

It's not entirely clear what Vitality (a gym/health club) is offering here:

Link: Vitality Gym, hen parties
 

Accident or design?

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 26

An essay on Homer's Odyssey, available online:

  Link: Lesley Roswell, 'Penelope: A Female Heroin'

 

I think this is what's called a double whammy.

You Cannot Be Serious, # 6

Today's contribution, courtesy of Bob Godiva, suggests that sponsorship can be a dangerous thing:

You need really good, clear diction for this one…

Here's the online version, where the illustration sports an unlikely caption, perhaps written tongue in cheek:

Link: Fair City News, Cox Sucker Days

Sadly, like so many of the best things in life, this turns out to be a mirage: as you've probably already guessed, Fair City News is, of course, a spoof publication (and well worth a look).

 

Not Washed or Cooked, # 6

Someone must have been paid to take the time to scan this in, run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, save the file, and upload the result: 

Link: HRVH Historical Newspapers, Southeastern New York Library Resources Council

Why, though? Never mind 'not 100% accurate': what possible use is the result to anyone?

With all the material there must be to archive, surely it's better just scan the original and upload it. This works:

Link: HRVH Historical Newspapers, Southeastern New York Library Resources Council, 2

 

Now Try It In English, # 2

This was quoted in a Daily Telegraph report that was rather generously supplied with mangles:

Link: The Telegraph, 'we would crime it'

A trawl round the internet shows that, so far at least, this mangle seems not to be widespread, though it's not unique —

Link: Yahoo, 'Crime Referrance Number'

— and it may, of  course, be standard police jargon, as this clip from a PoliceUK.com forum suggests:

 Link: PoliceUK.com, 'crime it'

The slogan 'Stamp Out Crime' was once common. How about 'Stamp Out "Crime" As A Verb'?

Not Washed or Cooked, # 5

It's fair to say that spellchecking isn't possible in this situation, and it's too late for proofreading at this stage. This photograph of a friend-of-a-friend's arm has been going round the internet for a while:

It was his first tattoo, and may well be his last; if not, I recommend a move to graphics-only.

Now Try It In English, # 1

This is rather eye-watering:

Link: The Telegraph, 'poor families are likely to be obese'

 

The speaker is Anna Soubry, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health, who has previously worked in journalism and law.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 25

A quick return today to a familiar and frequent mangle: 

Link: The Pubic Face of Wilkie Collins

The copyright on the webpage is 1997-2005. You'd have thought someone would have mentioned the error by now; but then there's no obvious way to contact the author…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 24

Another of my cousin's Christmas presents was a jolly little volume called The Quotations of Oscar Wilde, The Drawings of Simon Drew (2004), which included this typographical error:

At less than 50 pages, and mainly illustrations, it can't have been much effort to proofread the book properly.

You Cannot Be Serious, # 5

Today, a contribution from an alert Manglereader:

Link: BBC News, 18 January 2013, 'C&W buses disrupted by snow'

It's not apparent whether this was mangled by the representative from the NUT (that's the UK's National Union of Teachers, for the benefit of international readers) or the anonymous journalist. Both of them should have realized that 'behold' here was gibberish.*

 

Behove (or behoove, which US-English prefers, while UK-English uses either) is rather rare these days, but both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary include it as viable and in current usage.

* Given that one represents schoolteachers and the other writes for a living, both should also have known that the construction 'many official warnings' needs a plural verb form (more on verbal agreement soon), and that the 'not just' part of the not only but also formula should appear before 'to make a judgement' to make good sense.  However, since it's likely that the comments were made over the telephone, and possibly at short notice, these can't fairly be counted as full-blooded mangles.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 23

Today's mangles come from four different sources, all of which presumably want to be taken seriously, but all of which failed to check before publication whether their work contained unfortunate slips of the fingers.

Link: North Fork Merchant Herald, 'pubic face'

Link: Dartmouth College Library, 'pubic face'

Link: C&O Canal Trust, 'pubic face'

Link: Young, On Female Body Experience (New York: OUP, 2005), 'pubic face'

C&O might be forgiven, though even a non-profit organization should bother to proofread to make sure it's displaying itself as well as possible. The journalist should certainly know better, but it's not a rare error in the media. Dartmouth College Library is displaying a pretty dire 'pubic face' for this project; but the instance in Isis Marion Young's book takes the prize here: various educated persons, such as the publisher's reader(s) and maybe even an editor, will have read the work in its journey from proposal to publication and should have picked this one up. Perhaps they all thought Young was making some kind of obscure pun and didn't like to ask…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 22

Of course the pubic typo — of which more in due course: it's a popular one — can work both ways:

Link: Right Diagnosis, 'Public lice'

I'd rather not have had an opportunity to associate M&S with infestation… but apparently the advertising keeps the site free, and Right Diagnosis (RD) may be able to afford a proofreader one day. 

 

Right Diagnosis, in case you're wondering, is 'one of the world's leading providers of online medical health information'. That's what its About Us page says and it should know:

Link: Right Diagnosis, 'About us'

It's good to know consumers and health professionals have somewhere they can find information about public lice, whatever they are… except, as the astute will have spotted, it actually doesn't say that at all. It seems to be referring to a different website altogether: WrongDiagnosis.com.

So what happens when you type 'www.wrongdiagnosis.com' into an address bar and hit the return key?

You arrive here:

 Link: Better Medicine

It's beyond me! I think it may be beyond them too…

 

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 21

The world of university education may be stranger than you imagined. Below is a selection of courses and departments.

A course in the University of North Carolina Wilmington's brochure (corrected in the 2012-13 catalogue):

 Link: UNCW, CRM460, 'Crime & Pubic Policy' 

Wright State University is offering this course in 2012-13:

Link: Wright State, 'Pubic Policy Analysis'

The University of Massachusetts was offering comparative courses in 2011:

 Link: University of Massachusetts, 'Comparative Pubic Policy'

No-one seems to have checked this entry on Academia.edu for a department at Ashford University. Interesting combination though:

 Link: Ashford, 'Pubic Policy, Homeland Security' 

Another unusual academic department:

Link: Carnegie Mellon, 'Pubic Policy & Management'

 
It's a research area that turns out to be popular internationally:

Link: Fudan, 'Social Development & Pubic Policy'

Presumably this is the kind of thing you can go for when you've done the preliminary courses:

Link: Chicago/Minglebox, 'Master of Pubic Policy' 

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 20

Warwick University's student newspaper The Boar misplaced its spellchecker some time ago, and it still seems to be missing:

 Link: The Boar, 'accomdation'

 

The same error features in the printed version, which adds further information about the author.

 The Boar, 35:6 (9 January 2012), p. 7.

 
I'm not sure what a Comment Editor does, but it seems not to involve editing in the sense of checking or proofreading…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 19

Continuing on from yesterday's new thread, this doesn't sound very appetizing; fortunately it's not a cookbook:

Link: South Asia Books, 'Salt Dessert'

The word is spelt correctly on the cover of the image used by the outlet, and twice in the blurb, so there's no excuse…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 18

So many mangles, so little time… This is a classic:

Link: Fooyoh Entertainment, 'Sahara Dessert'

You Cannot Be Serious, # 4

It's not the hideous grammatical error that secures this clipping its place in You Cannot Be Serious, but the unfortunate extraneous preposition :

Source: Rugby Observer (print), 10 January 2013, p. 3;  online

You Cannot Be Serious, # 3

From the archives, this one goes well beyond the basics of spellchecking and proofreading, and into the land of fantasy newspaper caption creation — unless Mr Lang is being cast as a descendant of Sweeney Todd… It's a clipping I've cherished for many years; sadly, I forgot to date it (pre-mainstream internet, though), but I think it was published in the early 1990s:

 Source: Daily Telegraph (date unlogged)

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 17

Not least because of the rather strange link titles, I spent some time wondering whether this mangle was deliberate, perhaps an attempt to communicate an ironic or cynical message.

In the end, I decided that I was overthinking it: it's just an unchecked typographical error. (Note that it's also crept into the URL, which tends to offer a bigger challenge in terms of correcting errors subsequently.)

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/tag/paradigm-shit/

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 16

Like eNotes.com (see You Cannot Be Serious, # 2), StudyMode.com (motto: 'Inspiring Better Grades') offers essays to students, although the site explicitly decries plagiarism:

Let’s be clear: submitting another person's work as your own is plagiarism, and we’re against it. While you may legitimately cite these works and use them as reference material and thought-starters to your heart’s content, please do not turn in articles from this website as your own.

Link: StudyMode.com disclaimer

It's a bit of a conflict of interest, then, that the site carries sponsored advertising for tailored essays and reports:

Link: StudyMode.com disclaimer

StudyMode also has a premium service, with prices ranging from 29.95USD per month to 89.95USD for a six-month subscription,* which allows access to full-length essays.

In case you thought I'd forgotten the mangling, here's a small selection of examples, focussed on, but not confined to, a mangle we've encountered before and will certainly meet again:

Link: StudyMode.com, 'Functions of Government in Pubic Policy'

Link: StudyMode.com, 'Classification of Pubic and Private Education'

Link: StudyMode.com, 'Comparison of Stress Level…'

* Source: Sarah Glazer, 'Plagiarism and Cheating', CQ Researcher, 23 (4 January, 2013), 1-28. Consulted online, 8 January 2013.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 4

This is an example of the kind of typographical error I particularly despise, not simply because it's sloppy and avoidable, but because it turns tragedy into farce:

 Link: Daily Telegraph, 'shotting debt'

The word 'shotting' does, in fact, exist: the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'The action of weighting with shot; esp. in Angling, the weighting of the line with shot', though it's not in common usage, and the spellcheckers in Word, WordPerfect and Blogger have all highlighted it as unknown. Surely someone at the DT should have spotted it…

 

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 2

My cousin had this for Christmas:

Found it yet? Here's the detail enlarged:

They also do this one:

King of the kitchen, but not of the grammar…