Apostrophe catastrophe, # 94

Old-school full-stops (periods) to mark abbreviations: good; apostrophes to pluralize: bad — whatever planet you’re from!

U.F.O.’s

Not Washed or Cooked, # 254

Careless finishing:

Link: The University of Chicago Press, ‘Curtis E. Larsen, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands’

thousant for thousand

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 93

Direct to the inbox of Dr Faustus (top). and echoed online (bottom), a very oddly placed apostrophe:

Link: Zizzi, ‘Zizzi tackles cancer’

star’s for stars

Double-take, # 183

Following on from yesterday’s post… I’d gone online to find out whether the website for the Rollright Stones placed an apostrophe in King’s Men, unlike the sign at the physical site, and was surprised to find this oddness (which continues further down the page than I've clipped here) on the page that introduces the various sets of stones: 

Link: The Rollright Stones, ‘The Stones’

Diagnosis: unedited/undeleted placeholders. These may or may not have been visible to the person inputting the text, but they would certainly have been visible to someone checking the page, before (preferably) or after making it live, a practice that should be routine and which, as these leftovers demonstrate, is essential.

Insert… Insert… [&c. Undeleted instructions]

Multimangle, # 26

The stone circle alluded to here certainly predates the apostrophe, and the name applied to it may well do, but the modern signage at the site does not and apostrophes consistently appear in the name on the official website (of which more tomorrow). It is also not apparent why the name here is treated as a plural when ‘The Rollright Stones’ — equally plural to the naked eye — takes singular verb forms on the website (where this name does not appear as a subject); nor why the superfluous singular subject noun in the first paragraph on the sign is treated as if plural:

Kings Men

Singular or Plural? # 16

The Telegraph hedges its bets in this article about the RSPB:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘RSPB’s failure with hen harrier nests in £2m scheme’

RSPB has; RSPB have

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 92

Even though he’d previously spotted mangles in Reed’s job posts, Gary Hazell was taken aback at this one which, as the second screenshot (edited to include only the later section headings) shows, went on and on:

Link: Reed.co.uk, ‘Production Engineer — Swindon, Wiltshire’

you’re for your (x3)

Not Washed or Cooked, # 253

To celebrate the blog’s thousandth post, here is a lovely Midsomer Murders mangle that I’ve been saving for a special occasion:

Source: Midsomer Murders, series 13, episode 6, ‘The Noble Art’

turf accounants

Double-take, # 182

A redoubled prepositional mangle in this headline:

Link: Hereford Times, ‘Hereford dog believed […]’

to be added and removed to banned breed list

Double-take, # 181

I’m not sure this is a mangle at all, but it gave me a surprise in my local Lidl:

Barbie for Ken

Now Try It In English, # 6

Des Pond of Slough is particularly shocked at the source of this mangled text from a leaflet adverti-sing places of interest, though he doesn’t explain why he had believed the National Trust to be such a paragon of linguistic excellence! It is indeed a prodigious tangle of words, and also seems to be tacitly promising some form of séance:

hear bard himself will guiding you

Not Washed or Cooked, # 252

It is difficult to see how this error happened in the first place, given that the mangled vowel and the correct one are not close to each other on a standard QWERTY keyboard. The word can be found, correctly spelt, in at least two other places in the text:

Source: Diana Holmes, French Women’s Writing, 1848–1994. Women in Context (London & Atlantic Highlands: Athlone, 1996), p. 111, and online: Google Books

propoganda

Multimangle, # 25

This extract from a Co-operative in-store/staff circular, which comes via Dr Faustus, displays a wide range of mangles, including — but not limited to — misspellings, non-viable syntax, acyrologia and random punctuation:

there for their; trailed for trialled; evolve for involve; everyday for every day; we re set; incomplete sentence

Not Washed or Cooked, # 251

A mangle in what was overall a rather puzzling notice at Warwick University last term:

prgoress

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 91

While we’re on the subject (see yesterday’s post), this mangle appears in one of a series of large (this one is double page) advertisements currently being run by Sainsbury’s:

Source: The Sunday Times (6 September, 2015), The Dish section, pp. 2—3

Mac ‘n’ Cheese

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 90

The cover of a recently-published cookery book:

Anna Mae’s Mac N Cheese: Recipes From London’s Legendary Street Food Truck (London: Square Peg, 2015)

Mac N Cheese

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 89

From the Simply Home Entertainment DVD catalogue (August 2014, p. 13):

it’s title; it’s fans’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 250

An odd spelling error, supported by an incorrect quotation mark, from the online money-problem pages of The Guardian:

Link: The Guardian, ‘HSBC has closed my UK and expat bank accounts but refuses to say why’

bizzarely; ” for “

You Cannot Be Serious, # 55

Confusing labelling at the Rugby branch of Sainsbury’s earlier this year — and this is in addition to the fact that the name of the product on the label should be capitalized:

raspberries labelled jersey potatoes

Not Washed or Cooked, # 249

Another unchecked typographical error, spotted by Kieron Hayes:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Sent From Coventry: The album that charted city's hidden music scene’

luminaires for luminaries

Not Washed or Cooked, # 248

A heinous and surprising lack of editing, spell-checking and/or proofreading in this highly-respected version of Shakespeare’s works, in an updated edition containing individual introductions to the plays supplied by various academics from the University of Glasgow. (It isn’t clear who wrote this contribution, nor who edited the volume, the original editor having died in 1969.) The mangle was firmly rejected by Word, WordPerfect and the Firefox dictionary. As Dr Faustus says, ‘Next thing you know, King Lear will be described as a “villein”…’

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text, ed. by Peter Alexander
(Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 916

villians for villains