Apostrophe catastrophe, # 44

One of yesterday’s superfluous apostrophes might have found a home here:

Link: Amazon.co.uk, Soldiers Songs’ and Slang of the Great War

Soldiers Songs

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 43

This estate agency mangle was posted through my letterbox — though not as a mangle!

EPC’s & viewing’s

Double-take, # 70

I’ve provided a bit of a run-up to this so it’s apparent quite how confusing the use of pronouns is:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Bampton: infamy in the Prime Minister’s back yard’

which he?

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 128

From a Coventry estate agent’s window:

Mo Upward Chain

Double-take, # 69

New-found Mangler was made very cross on Sunday by the Guardian’s thoroughly mangled report on the Pope’s visit to Bethlehem:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Pope Francis offers prayers at Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem’

I can’t imagine the Vatican being very pleased — the Frances spelling generally applies only to girls and the medieval ‘Pope Joan’ myth is still taken as gospel by the credulous — and indeed the errors have now been corrected, but the Internet is an unforgiving place, and remembers earlier versions:

Link: Google Search "Security was light. Frances"

It may be a while before the journalist in question lives this one down…
Pope Francis and Frances

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 127

The opening sentence of this report showcases a past participle mangle and a duplication:

Link: Rugby Observer, 8 May 2014, p. 13

have been affect

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 126

A clipped style?

Source: Simply Home Entertainment, May 2014, p. 15

mix f politics

Double-take, # 68

A very literal double-take this time:

Link: The Independent, ‘After 100,000 miles, Palin gives up globetrotting’

duplicate paragraph

Not Washed or Cooked, # 140

Link: Politics.co.uk: Ian Dun, ‘Prison book ban: Grayling hits back at critics’

It would have made great copy, but, notwithstanding the quotation marks, he didn’t. He spelt the word correctly every time he used it.

priviliges

Not Washed or Cooked, # 139

Dr Faustus found this on the website of the International Conference of Undergraduate Research (ICUR):

Link: International Conference of Undergraduate Research, ‘Submit an Abstract’

Presentration

Not Washed or Cooked, # 138

Des Pond of Slough recently spotted this blissful mangle:

Link: Rugby Observer, 17 April 2014, p. 19

sophistiated

Not Washed or Cooked, # 137

Connections for really important information?

Link: The Independent, ‘Why is my internet so slow? […]’

I wondered briefly — this being the world of journalism — whether ‘superfact’ actually existed, which would make this a Spellchecking Is Never Enough mangle; but standard spell-checkers (WordPerfect, Word and Google) and a Google search suggest not.

superfact connection

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 125

Today brings another example of lapsed concentration from the text featured yesterday:

Nosheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 105, mangling Elinor Jenkins’s poem, ‘Night in the Suburbs, August 1914’. Link: GoogleBooks

Gold for God; Gold only knows

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 42

Today, wandering apostrophe syndrome:

Nosheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War (University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 51. Link: GoogleBooks

wandering apostrophe – soldiers’ and soldiers transposed

Not Washed or Cooked, # 136

The bulleted list begins with a separated compound, ends with a major mangle and is sprinkled with random capital letters:

Link: Amazon, ‘White Reusable Muslin Bags […]’

Draw Strings; random capitalization; sticthings

Not Washed or Cooked, # 140

Presumably not what it says on the packet! …Either time…

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Kids in the kitchen’

demerera

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 43

Some readers will recall that this novel have featured before — more than once. This is, I think, the last from my archive, and a wonderful mangle it is too!

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 218. Link: Amazon.co.uk

I’m not sure what the writer thinks eek means. Certainly she’s not evoking an Middle English word for ‘also’, or having her character make an interjection of surprise. Yet eke, which OED confirms means ‘to lengthen’ or ‘to prolong’ or ‘to supplement’, doesn’t seem to fit the context either. 

Merriam Webster, dismissing the meaning related to increasing or lengthening as archaic, offers a single example of modern usage, defining eke as ‘to get with great difficulty — usually used with out <eke out a living>’; and Oxford Dctionaries concurs: ‘eke (eke something out): Make an amount or supply of something last longer by using or consuming it frugally’.

However, this doesn’t seem to be something one can do with a name…

eek out the name

Mangling Meaning, # 24

I’m not sure where Bob Godiva found this (and he was slightly cagey when I enquired), but it’s a princely example of obfuscation:

school free drug zone

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 41

Not the usual kind of catastrophe today; more of a failure to polish before publication:

Link: Chard Property and Lifestyle, Spring/Summer 2014, p. 12

restaurant from top Indian chef Atul Kochhar’s

Not Washed or Cooked, # 135

Q.E.D.?

Link: Contact page on the website of The Lazy Cow, Stratford-upon-Avon

conact for contact

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 124

Whoops!

Women’s Writing of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. by Angela K. Smith (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 9

dairy for diary

Double-take, # 67

This supposed quotation is doing the rounds on Facebook. Headlining is an eyewatering syntactical swerve, with support from a shift in logic and some odd punctuation:

Out of interest, I ran the offending sentence through Word’s grammar-checking function (both the UK and US versions), together with a control.

Only the control error was flagged.
in a time, where if something was broke, you fixed it … not throw it away

Not Washed or Cooked, # 134

I usually let these go by, or post snippets from them on the Mangling English Facebook page. However, in addition to the usual syntactical singularities, this has a few spelling oddities worth sharing:

fallowing for following; recentely; instantely; syntax

Not Washed or Cooked, # 133

From Des Pond of Slough:

wating area, vehicles worth it

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 40

You’d think UKIP would support correct English grammar…:

it’s for its

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 42

Submitted by Bob Godiva, and presumably the error of the journalist taking down spoken comments:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Do you know what you’re eating?’

donor kebabs

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 123

Inadequate punctuation and a failure to proofread

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Confusion over new rules for retirement savings’

polices for policies

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 39

A disagreement in grammar between the writer of the breadcrumb feed title (top) and the author of the original headline (bottom):

Link: The Times, ‘Patients at risk as GPs face forced shutdown’

GP’s

Not Washed or Cooked, # 132

Presumably the writer pronounces it like this too:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Coventry ring road crash driver thanks University Hospital staff for care’

amatuer

Problem punctuation, # 11

More than a little under-punctuated:

Max Feldman, Review of Ghost Stories, ‘Young Chelsea’, Kensington & Chelsea Today, 30 (April 2014), p. 24, and online

punctuation; syntax

Double-take, # 66

The Best Gapp estate agency is marketing a house in London with a very unusual feature:

Link: The Resident, May 2014. See also link: RightMove, ‘3 bedroom mews house for sale’

It doesn’t explain how you’d get the car up there… Ultimately it’s not clear whether the house has a ‘roof terrace garden’ or whether the description should say ‘roof terrace, garage’.

roof terrace garage

Not Washed or Cooked, # 131

This notice was posted last week in an elevator in the Humanities block of a Russell Group university. I had to take the photograph twice, as the annotation had appeared between my first and second trip:

adviced; your welcome