The Wrong Word Entirely, # 100

Another nonsensical preposition:

Link: The Sunday Times, ‘Archbishop Warns of Campus Anti-Semites’

echoes with for echoes of

Double-take, # 211

An utter mess:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘First Bite: How We Learn to Eat’

too many employees’ waistline exceeds

Double-take, # 202

How can any professional writer think that a singular verb might be appropriate here? (The article’s title seems short of a possessive pronoun, too.)

Link: The Sunday Times, ‘Money’ section, ‘At 95, I’m fighting the NHS to fund wife’s care’

millions of pounds has [+ title: At 95, I’m fighting the NHS to fund wife’s care]

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

You Cannot Be Serious, # 43

This substitution of an adverb for a relative pronoun reads oddly:

Link: The Sunday Times, ‘Healthcare system is in need of a cure’

to where for to which

Double-take, # 129

This seems a very odd construction to use in the context:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Superfit Jools eyes up 5th child’

For clarification, the article suggests that Jamie Oliver and his wife, Jools, may be considering an addition to their family. Oxford Dictionaries confirms that ‘eye up’ means ‘Look at someone in a way that reveals a particular, especially sexual, interest’; while Collins English Dictionary doesn’t offer a non-sexual variant, defining the term as: ‘to look at in a manner indicating sexual interest; ogle’ (eyes, number 40).
    Even without the sexual dimension, it would be difficult to ‘eye up’ someone who does not yet, and may never, exist.

Jools eyes up 5th child

Double-take, # 112

A glaring typographical error is compounded by a very odd construction. I can’t find a source that refers to this noun being adopted as a verb, although it can be used as an adjective:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘How to boutique you home [sic]’

How to boutique you home

You Cannot Be Serious, # 28

From the second paragraph of a report on inputting bank details incorrectly:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Call to help “fat-fingered” retrieve their lost millions’

What here could possibly suggest that a singular verb form might be appropriate?
Millions of pounds is

Double-take, # 100

What can happen when a commentator on education fails to check for sense before posting:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Please, Sir! Why is my son reading a crisp packet for homework?’

The earlier text has indeed focussed on the writer’s son, but the paragraph directly before this one refers to both children, so the sudden reference to the daughter results in a nonsense. One might also raise an eyebrow at the final sentence since there has been only one recent plural noun and thus the pronoun they seems to be referring to the Doritos…

My daughter aged 11 is given three minutes of homework a week. One weekend he told me…

Double-take, # 99

On the face of it, this headline is offering bad advice:

Sources: The Sunday Times, ‘Money’ section, 7 September 2014, p. 6

The online version makes more sense:

Link: The Sunday Times

Not the same message at all.
Don’t write a will, all you’re likely to leave behind is confusion

Singular or Plural? # 9

Someone at The Sunday Times seems to be having difficulty with the concept of grammatical number in relation to money, whether represented in full words or abbreviated:

Link The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Ministers back our call to end savings scandal’

That is a lot of pounds for a singular verb to carry on its own, and the failure to harmonize verb and subject noun recurs in the body of the report:

The report’s opening sentence offers further confirmation that this is an entrenched grammatical error rather than a one-off slip:

It’s an incomprehensible mangle and there is no excuse for it.
£122bn earns; £122bn is; millions of pounds is

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 132

Not an illogical error in the context?

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Dazzlingly trashy Dolly shows us the power of a lost art — charm’

ass we sat

Singular or Plural? # 7

For no reason that I can discern, various writers have recently acquired a habit of harnessing a singular verb to a subject made up of two clearly disparate nouns connected with the conjunction and, thus:

Link: The Sunday Times, breadcrumb — quotation from ‘Table Talk: Beast, London W1’

In addition to ignoring the basic principle of grammatical number, upon which the authorities and textbooks seem to be in agreement, a combination of this kind disrupts the flow by creating confusion in the reader. Are both nouns supposed to be there, or has something gone wrong in the editing process? If the writer had intended to remove one of the nouns, which one? The questions are unanswerable, but the reader is now distracted and, depending on the type of work, may even have lost confidence in the writer’s authority.

The tendency is becoming more widespread in journalism, and it occurs habitually in some students’ written work. This suggests either that the error is being transmitted at school by certain teachers who themselves misunderstand the grammar, or that the error is not been flagged, possibly because of the modern practice of correcting only a quota of mistakes in written work.

the expense and value is

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

Not Washed or Cooked, # 130

From The Sunday Times newspaper:

The Sunday Times, 20 April 2014, ‘Money’ section, p. 7

and online:

Link: The Sunday Times, ‘Money Made Easy’, 20 April 2014

self-empolyed

Singular or Plural? # 6

This subheading’s confusion in number may well arise from having too many nouns ahead of the verb:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘A quarter of flood claims face risk of rejection’

small print in home insurance policies from Admiral and Co-op refuse

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 36

In amongst the mix-and-match of media I graze on, I used to buy and read The Times and The Sunday Times fairly often, until they started charging for the online versions, and I gave them up as a matter of principle.

However, as newspapers sometimes feature in the blog, I'd been wondering whether I should give the Times family the option to be included to maintain the balance; so I started to investigate the options. They were not impressive.

Bad

This is from the page where Times Newspapers Ltd sets out its wares:

 

 Link: Times Newspapers Ltd, subscriptions

Forty-three words, one unchecked typographical error and one misplaced comma: not a good score.

Badder

A read through yesterday's Sunday Times shows that misplaced commas are popular; perhaps it's a house style. There's an absent comma that the editor of the Letters page should certainly have inserted to prevent inappropriate hilarity arising when reading a sad missive on a serious topic. (In the interests of taste, I haven't harvested it or included it here.) It made me wonder, not for the first time, what exactly editors do these days. Even Wikipedia (citing the work of Alexander Mamishev and Sean Williams) accurately states that 

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete work.

Key aspects are correctness and accuracy, which are frequently missing from the news media.

Baddest*

Yesterday's Sunday Times also published three corrections (reproduced here from p. 28 of the physical newspaper; the various errors had not made me rush to enter my credit card details to secure digital access…):

All three are details that could, and definitely should, have been verified before publication.

Overall, not very impressive, and I've read only the main newspaper so far. Going back to the products page, it's not even clear whether the delivered newspapers are put through the letterbox; the Sunday Times is now so huge that it seems scarcely possible. As we've seen, the weekly and Sunday papers are taken to 'you door', but the Times Literary Supplement, although much thinner than its Sunday relative, doesn't make it that far:**

Soggy supplement, anyone?

*Bad, usually spelt badde, badder and baddest were the medieval precursors of the modern bad, worse and worst. (See that great resource, the Middle English Dictionary, hosted by the University of Michigan, under badde.)

** It is, though, much more professional in its use of punctuation.