Multimangle, # 38

Dr Faustus has found this piece of prose, which mangles grammar, syntax, punctuation and meaning:

Link: Generator, ‘More than a hostel’

your for you’re; shifting perspective; syntax; spacing

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 75

This is the Facebook notification of the results of an internet questionnaire, which may well have more mangles in it and can be found here:

lam of innocence

Double-take, # 24

This is what automatically shows when you find a word on the Thesaurus.com website and post the URL:

Obviously better at direct articles than indirect articles…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 54

An odd way to advertise services:

Link: BestPay

Contributor Richard Bonsor’s covering comment was: ‘Not very confident in their services: “upto” is now one word. “Complaint”?  I hope they are better with their mathematics.’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 50

I don’t know whether this means that today’s mangle is a localized issue, but all three of the examples that I’ve found come from the Antipodes:

Link: LinkedIn | Scott Kerse, Partner at PwC, Auckland, New Zealand

Link: News.co.au | Business | ‘So you want to be an entreprenuer?’

 Link: BusinessVictoria, ‘Overcoming challenges as a young entreprenuer’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 41

Thinking of going on holiday? Some days may be more difficult for travel than others, especially on flights from Birmingham Airport:

Link: Birmingham Airport | Route Finder (detail/edit)

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 12

Here's the text from a pop-up (with a rather nice picture, which you can see by following the link) that popped up at me last week:

Link: Great British Chefs pop-up advertisement

This issue has arisen before with kids (Apostrophe Catastrophe, # 6). The omission of the apostrophe from kids recipes makes it seem as if the kids are the key ingredient, a sense rather consolidated by the name of the application. Cooking with vegetables, cooking with spices, cooking with kids…

The application of the adjective amazing is not unambiguous either.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 38

The last one in this thread is a site that featured a few days ago, and here offers a range of mangles:

Link: The Spiritual Gift | Tarot Cards Page 2

Not Washed or Cooked, # 36

An unusual planetary misspelling occurs in the book description here:

Link: American Federation of Astrologers | Books | Cal Garrison, The Astrology of 2012 and Beyond

Not Washed or Cooked, # 32

There are some words you really should be able to spell if you're offering Tarot readings. This is one of them:

Link: The Awareness Shop | Lisa'a Tarotscopes

Not Washed or Cooked, # 27

Hope Adroit Services Ltd are better at the plumbing than the proofing…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 26

Here are some examples of a not-uncommon mangle that shouldn't have got through a proofread, and clearly didn't have a spell-check. First, a headline:

Link: Daily Telegraph, 'Good News Britian…'

The writer may not have been responsible for the headline, of course, but it does make you wonder whether the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development is an institute where spelling doesn't matter…

Now some copy, so definitely the fault of the writer, Stuart Kelly:

Link: The Scotsman, 'King Arthur, Prince of Scots'

And finally, a heading that undermines the authority of anything else on the page:

 Link: The Full Wiki, 'Great Britian: Wikis'

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 49

This little gem was going the rounds on Facebook not long ago (and probably still is, that being the nature of the beast). It's found on the Internet in various versions, some of them spelt correctly. This version isn't (this is Mangling English: if you want a version that's spelt correctly, you'll need to go elsewhere…), though I'm not sure whether the site linked below is where it originated or not.

Leaving aside the oddities produced by the abbreviated style, the last piece of 'advice' has clearly not been subject to any kind of spell-checking or proofreading routine:

Link: DateHookUp.com, 'Health Tips,care to share?'

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 45

A little extra one for Easter.

The Wiki site Answers.com seems to contain a lot of very basic questions marked by incorrect spelling and capitalization. Here's a topical exchange from the site:

Link: Answers.com, 'What do christians celerbrate on ester Sunday?'

The answer isn't much better, and contains a major grammatical ouch:

The type of errors in presentation on the site sometimes make me wonder if the entries have been fabricated, but then I'm a tad cynical…

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, # 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, # 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'

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 2

Apparently CIFAS are using Ali G to do their proofreading…

(Note: if you have your website designed by someone else, it's a bonus if the designer checks the textual content you provide, not a basic part of the package. You're paying for the website to be designed and created, but you supply the text and it's your website, so it's up to you to check that it is correct.)