Not Washed or Cooked, # 300

A Times breadcrumb with echoes of yesterday’s mangle:

holidy

Double-take, # 210

Here, complete with superfluity, are the opening paragraphs of a recent report in The Times:

Source: The Times (8 January, 2016), p. 17, and online

Patricia Leask […] “got in a few good scratches on his face” although she damaged her own nails in the process.

Double-take, # 160

Tautological redundancy in The Times:

Link: The Times, ‘Female seamstress “smuggled hacksaw to US jailbreakers”’

female seamstress

Not Washed or Cooked, # 231

A mangle from a while ago:

Link: The Times, ‘Top Gear hosts “refused to carry on without Clarkson”’

corpration

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 39

A disagreement in grammar between the writer of the breadcrumb feed title (top) and the author of the original headline (bottom):

Link: The Times, ‘Patients at risk as GPs face forced shutdown’

GP’s

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 36

This comes from a report of one of my favourite stories of the year so far, Oxford City Council’s refusal to issue a licence for the performance of a Passion Play on Good Friday, because someone mistook it for a sex show:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Not a Good Friday as “sex show” error cuts out Passion’

councils licensing officers

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 34

It’s not clear who mangled the number of wits in this rather bizarre statement from a letter to The Times’s Troubleshooter column:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), Troubleshooter, ‘BT worse than flood’

Oxford Dictionaries confirms that wits should be pluralized.
wit’s end

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 112

Brian Appleyard briefly takes his eye off the ball in a review of Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Review: Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us […]’

thought for though

Double-take, # 49

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘It was a mistake to stop dredging […]’

Surely calls can’t be anything but vocal, so how can their vocalness (vocality? Vocalisticness?) increase? increasingly vocal calls

Not Washed or Cooked, # 79

How can you not notice this?

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Troublehsooter […]’

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 93

Here’s a couple of examples of another mangle a spellchecker can’t pick up:

Link: MailOnline, ‘Attractive man wooed me […]’

Link: The Telegraph, ‘New query over HRT […]’

A staple of student essays, the error also occurs regularly in published texts, and even in writing by feminists:*

 

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Fairy tale ending’

Link: The Guardian, ‘Why is feminism still so afraid to focus on its flaws?’

* It is rare, perhaps non-existent, in the masculine variant. If you have an example, you know where to send it!

Not Washed or Cooked, # 78

A failure to spellcheck or proofread, augumented by pronoun-induced ambiguity:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Forced marriage to be a crime’

Multimangle, # 3

The first paragraph needed spellchecking and/or proofreading, and there are several confusing shifts between singular and plural forms in the last two paragraphs:

Link: The Times (subscription only), ‘Retired police dogs to get ‘“state pensions”’

Double-take, # 27

There seems to be something important missing from this subheading:

Link (subscription access only): The Times, Troubleshooter (24 July, 2010), ‘Tax on draughty’

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 58

In addition to treating gods here as if it were a proper noun, this box from The Times concludes with a spelling error:

The Times, 4 June 2013, p. 5

Problem punctuation, # 2

The Case of the Missing Comma

From The Times, 29 May 2013, p. 34.

Singular or Plural? # 5

Wednesday's Times hedging its grammatical bets:

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.