You Cannot Be Serious, # 69

The caption-writer either doesn’t understand the term ‘clockwise’ or needs to learn to check details before posting… This was spotted by Dr Faustus, who explains: ‘If the photos were correctly read clockwise from top left, the bottom two pictures should be swapped over. Result: unintentionally hilarious image of the Mad Hatter as a new X-Man’ — so crossed streams after all?

Link: The Guardian, ‘Scorchers: The Hottest Films of Summer 2016’

misordered caption – X-Men/Alice crossover]

Not Washed or Cooked, # 307

It would seem that The Guardian still has no spell-checking facilities:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Berlin’s Government Legislates against Airbnb’

officals

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 97

Another pesky homophone (and a confused title):

Link: The Guardian, ‘In challenging homophobia, gay men have become our own oppressors’

routes for roots

Not Washed or Cooked, # 287

A strange new word in an article on good university teachers:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Want to improve teaching in universities? Value those who teach’

proposesusing

Not Washed or Cooked, # 285

The opening paragraph of a news item from earlier this week. The mangled word is spelt correctly later in the report:

Link: The Guardian, ‘London students refuse to pay rent and demand 40% cut’

accomodation

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 213

Dr Faustus found this mangle (now corrected) amongst the media‘s tributes to Alan Rickman:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Alan Rickman, giant of British screen and stage, dies at 69’

carton for cartoon

Not Washed or Cooked, # 276

This is taken from The Guardian’s version of an article first published (as a comment at the end advises) in Mosaic — without the mangle. This rather implies that someone at The Guardian has been practising hypercorrection. A note subsequently added to the text refers to a factual correction made on 16 December; this mangle, however, remains:

Link: The Guardian, ‘What science doesn’t know about the menopause: what it’s for and how to treat it’

bespioke

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 106

This comes from the mangle backlog, and seems a suitable running-mate for the unusual apostrophe catastrophe found by Dr Faustus and featured on 29 November, 2015:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Marks & Spencer under fire over online tax arrangements’

M&’s for M&S’s

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 “

Double-take, # 164

There are times when it is perfectly correct to place commas around further information. This is not one of them:

Link: The Guardian, ‘First crop of £9,000 tuition fee-paying UK graduates “more focused on pay”’

The adjectival clause (or adjective clause) that provides details about timing and fees in the subheading is intended to qualify the subject noun ‘graduates’, but notably this information relates only to students who began their courses in 2012, and not to any others. The information is thus limited, making this an essential adjectival clause, which should not be separated by commas. As it stands, the comma separation incorrectly extends the focus from a specific group of graduates — the 2012 student intake — to all graduates, which is nonsensical since earlier students were not paying fees at the stated rate. (It might also be noted that, as many have yet to go through the formal graduation process, they are probably still graduands, rather than graduates, a distinction the education-minded Guardian should know.)

An essential (or a defining or restrictive) adjectival clause contains crucial information about the subject, without which the whole point is lost. Conversely, an adjectival clause that offers further details that are not necessary to understanding the central point is called non-essential (or non-defining or non-restrictive). This additional information, which can be removed without affecting the meaning of the sentence, should be placed within a pair of commas.

A detailed explanation of these clauses and their uses can be found on the Cambridge Dictionaries Online website. More succinct explanations and examples are offered by The Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (note that in US-English the hyphenated descriptors, ‘non-essential’ and so on, become compounds: ‘nonessential’), and also the German website englisch-hilfen.de, which offers some useful observations on correct and colloquial usage.

essential adjectival clause punctuated as non-essential

Not Washed or Cooked, # 226

Not the most effective of translations (now corrected):*

Link: The Guardian, ‘Music rules the airwaves as French radio journalists’ strike stretches on’

it for her; puppel for puppet

* The original speech is quoted in full in Le Monde, ‘Radio France: “Ils jouent avec votre radio, notre avenir”’.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 178

Media Twitter feeds — unsurprisingly — regularly feature mangles, such as this one:

Link: Guardian Twitter feed

spark for park

Not Washed or Cooked, # 225

An insensitive typographical error spotted by Dr Faustus:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Sir Christopher Bayly obituary’

The headline formulation is sloppy too: ‘obituary’ either needs to be made a content-type heading (Sir Christopher Bayly: Obituary or Obituary: Sir Christopher Bayly) or the text rephrased to make the term sound less like part of the man’s name (Obituary of Sir Christopher Bayly) — and when did academic professional titles cease to take initial capitals?

profressor

You Cannot Be Serious, # 41

A new contributor, with the nom-de-mangle fellow grammar enthusiast & coffee snob, has sent this horrible headline and subhead, which only a small change in word order and/or better punctuation might have improved — and when did headings become so lengthy and detailed?

Link: The Guardian

For mentally ill too often prison means solitary, neglect, and even death || […] series of failures by authorities that are only too common

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

Double-take, # 74

This Guardian writer is horrified by implicit gender stereotyping in some primary school homework. It’s a fair concern; but the hideous confusion of pronouns seems a greater problem than the font face. Surely politically-correct grammar only has any claim to validity if it’s consistent?

Link: The Guardian, ‘Young children must be protected from ingrained gender stereotypes’

he … they; they … wife

You Cannot Be Serious, # 38

Grammatical contradiction:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Police from several UK forces seek details of Charlie Hebdo readers’

The variation of relative pronouns here is nonsensical. Traditionally, who is used for human beings and that for inanimate objects. Although this distinction is not always maintained, the needs of clarity demand that there should be consistency in the usage chosen; but there isn’t here. Why is the customer’s humanity allowed, but not the newsagent’s? Perhaps the authors — there are two — meant to write newsagent’s, thus referring not to the person, but to the business, which would, of course, take that not who.

newsagent that, customer who

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 162

Always check the little words, for mangling them can alter meanings, create confusion and/or produce nonsense:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Ex-Sun [Sic] journalist on trial for article he didn’t write, court hears’

now for not; identify for identity

Not Washed or Cooked, # 196

Two versions of a mangled breadcrumb that appeared on the Guardian’s webpages last week:

attle for battle

Double-take, # 111

Here’s a mangle from yesterday’s Guardian. It’s an article headline, ‘the one part you’d think they’d get right,’ comments contributor Mo Juste. Given the generous print size, it is indeed surprising that no-one noticed before it was too late:

Source: The Guardian, ‘The time has come time to slow down immigration’, ‘Journal’ section, p. 33

The headline of the online version seems not to have contained the error, even on initial publication.
The time has come time to slow down immigration