Mangling Meaning, # 38

Via Dr Faustus, meaning is much mangled by a failure (throughout the report) to use the required initial capital letter for the adjective. The odd punctuation in the opening sentence is a bonus:

Link: BBC News

catholic for Catholic; Chief Constable, George Hamilton, says

Mangling Meaning, # 37

Incoherence verging on utter nonsense from The Express:

Link: The Express, ‘Outrage as Hotel Homes 300 Asylum Seekers — Without Telling Anyone’

asylum seekers have been housed in a major hotel without informing anyone; in what the authorities claim is on the sly

Mangling Meaning, # 36

Dr Faustus has submitted this snapshot from a BBC report which has since been much (and tacitly) rewritten. (The original text is reproduced verbatim here and elsewhere online.) In the second paragraph here, further comments from an expert previously quoted are reported very badly, and the punctuation seems to have been inserted at random:

Link: BBC News, ‘How low can the oil price go – and what is the impact?’

He adds that a great level of unrest might add a geopolitical unrest – and consequent worries about supplies – might push prices higher. But not by much, he says.

Mangling Meaning, # 35

How many people have been arrested? (Headline and subhead have now been carefully rewritten to resolve the confusion.)

Link: The Telegraph, ‘French police “arrest man with guns in suitcase” […]’

Man arrested […] another woman arrested with him

Mangling Meaning, # 34

‘I can’t even begin to make sense of this,’ writes Des Pond of Slough:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘“Mummified” body of adventurer found in abandoned yacht to be identified by sailor’s daughter’

he last heard of him ago on social media for his birthday

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

Multimangle, # 29

Today’s main mangle, an adjective that has been mistaken for a similar word, sits in glorious splendour at the head of this screamer. The adjacent caption uses the mangled word correctly, and shows why it was wrong when first used, and also contains a lovely mangle of its own!

Link: Rugby Observer, 12 November, 2015, p. 1

seasonal for seasonable; Cristmas

Double-take, # 180

This pair of mangles (and some dubious punctuation) comes from an estate agents’ description of a property:

Link: Rightmove, Edward Knight (Elizabeth Way, Long Lawford, Rugby, Warwickshire)

is two sheds and a green house; punctuation

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 84

It’s hard to tell whether this error is the journalist’s or the bank’s, although surely the former should have corrected it anyway. Since t and p are not adjacent on the keyboard, it’s probably not a typographical error, and is more likely to be a mondegreen or eggcorn since, when sounded with a glottal stop, the wrong word can barely, if at all, be distinguished from the correct word. Similar errors in published writing and in students’ written work suggest that this is becoming an increasingly common problem.

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Scandal of the missing cash from dormant RBS account’

upmost for utmost

Mangling Meaning, # 33

Is this ambiguity, redundancy or plain confusion in a promotional email from TomTom? Des Pond of Slough wonders: ‘Does “at once” mean immediately or simultaneously here? Is it “quickly” or “multiple” that is being rendered superfluous?’ 

quickly charge multiple devices at once

Mangling Meaning, # 32

Omitted pronoun results in ambiguity:

Link: The Times, ‘Lecturer wins £100,000 in costs and damages after being deceived over child’

his former wife and former boyfriend

Mangling Meaning, # 31

Going the rounds on social media (but original source unknown) is this assembly of mangled syntax and grammar, which, in nonsensically separating its prepositional ‘but’ from the clause it is supposed to qualify with end of sentence punctuation, manages to compromise its own point:

nonsensical ‘But’ starts sentence; changed for has changed; punctuation…

Mangling Meaning, # 30

One from John Holloway. He didn’t say where he found it, but he did comment: ‘Preposition errors can make SUCH a difference to the meaning!’

coming at my home

Mangling Meaning, # 28

The odd phrasing here leads to an unlikely, unpleasant and erroneous premise:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Husband and wife found dead in suspected murder-suicide’

The combination of ‘is accused’ and ‘before’ suggests a cause and effect scenario which is not — this being journalism — negated by the shift of tense from the headline to the subhead. Someone who is dead cannot be ‘accused’ in the sense of being charged with an offence; but the only other meaning of the word (see Oxford Dictionaries), to claim someone has done something wrong, is also illogical: as the circumstances are as yet uncertain, it cannot be firmly asserted that events transpired as stated here. Perhaps the writer should have changed the verb and used one of those spare allegedlys from last week.

A […] man is accused of killing his 73-year-old wife in the bedroom before taking his own life

Mangling Meaning, # 27

A syntactical illogicality results in unintentional and unfortunate humour:

Link: The Guardian, ‘What do doctors say to “alternative therapists” […]’

after he died and was forced to sell the house

Mangling Meaning, # 26

Another strange verbal construction and some less than smooth punctuation from Sky’s on-screen television guide:

sold 250 millions

Mangling Meaning, # 25

This is another example of yesterday’s mangle, this time preceded by some confusing syntax:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Coventry pensioner conned out of cash in bogus lottery scam’

Ambiguity results from the omission of the conjunction that, which would indicate both the start of the subordinate clause and its relation to the main clause, and its replacement with inaccurate and inadequate punctuation. These errors mean that the ground is not prepared for the rest of the sentence, and indeed make it seem at first that the Trading Standards spokeswoman is replying to the correspondence. The omission of the conjunction also means that it is unclear whether the section beginning ‘victims’ is correctly shown as reported speech (Morgan said [that] victims), or actually direct speech that lacks quotation marks (Morgan said: ‘Victims’), which is underlined by the use of the same term, said, to introduce both direct and indirect speech. The whole is nonsensically laid out in paragraphs made of short, single sentences, producing a disjointed style that does not aid comprehension.

syntax [missing that = ambiguity]; paragraphing; sucker’s list

Not Washed or Cooked, # 149

Another contextually-pleasing slip, plus a fine example of mangling meaning:

Link: Zoopla property listing 32423624

Good scholl catchment; Call envisage to today

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

Double-take, # 62

A puzzle from my inbox:

No, Nectar, a comma is not the same as an infinitive ‘to’.
help us, help you