Apostrophe catastrophe, # 94

Old-school full-stops (periods) to mark abbreviations: good; apostrophes to pluralize: bad — whatever planet you’re from!

U.F.O.’s

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 98

This has been doing the rounds on Facebook:

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 23

Dr Faustus was targeted on Facebook with the following advertisement:

Multimangle, # 1

Not the first blog entry with multiple mangles, but one that justifies the creation of a new general category.

Extracted from the website for Heritage Open Days 2013:

Link: Heritage Open Days 2013, Cemex

The ‘ot’ obviously never met a spell-checker, a comma is needed after both tower, since there’s only one, and Church, while Mathews lacks both a possessive apostrophe and a second t.

To be fair, the church’s name presents a challenge elsewhere, including on its own community website, where it’s shown variously as 

Link: m2o Rugby

and

In the first instance, the abbreviation of Saint should not take a full stop since the word is not curtailed (in contrast to the St. used to represent Street). Instead, letters are missing from the middle, but it’s more usual simply to write St, rather than the strictly correct S’t (compare foc’s’le for forecastle), which looks both unwieldy and a little silly.

Both entries fail on possessive apostrophes. One has made no attempt to include any, while the latter correctly deals with St Oswald, but ignores the need to present St Matthew’s name in the possessive form. (Unlike Fortnum and Mason or Morecambe and Wise, the saints are not in a permanent partnership; thus if one requires an apostrophe, the other does too.)

The most sensible option, of course, would be to call it The Church of St Matthew and St Oswald: this is less of a tongue-twister and likely to involve less spitting when said aloud, and it removes the need for anyone to grapple with grammar when writing it down. This version is indeed what it says on the sign outside the church, and what the Archbishops’ Council’s A Church Near You website calls it, except for the hedging of bets when abbreviating saint:

Link: A Church Near You, St Matthew and St Oswald

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 15

Spotted on an advertising hoarding, this is a variant of the issue addressed in the first Apostrophe catastrophe:

The opening quotation mark should, of course, be an apostrophe, since it’s representing a missing letter within the contraction. Perhaps that should have warned filmgoers what to expect…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 13

nPower’s second appearance within weeks (the first was also connected with reading meters) contains something that shouldn’t have made it to the published page, and didn’t go through a spell-checker:

Source: nPower personalized customer webpage

Perhaps not surprising considering the odd capitalization of the company’s name…

Double-take, # 12

Des Pond of Slough was slightly puzzled by content in an email from the Open University:

He remarks: ‘I would assume that “modern advertising” was still using 13th- to 17th-century techniques, or have I fallen through a temporal anomaly?’

It’s also worth pointing out that the phrase ‘the 13th to 17th century’ needs another direct article, might benefit from pluralizing its noun (‘the 13th to the 17th centuries’), and would seem more elegant, and thus more professional, without the unnecessary abbreviations (thus: ‘the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries’), which might have resulted in fewer errors in the first place.

Mangling Meaning, # 15

We featured a mangle from the novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War a couple of weeks ago, but that was a straightforward homophone. This error is harder to fathom:

London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2006, p. 209. Link: Google Books, ‘bodies’ concerned’

The grammar-checking function in both Word and WordPerfect fail to identify a problem in this sentence; nor was the problem detected by the few free grammar checkers I tried it out on, although Reverso did correct the sentence — to this nonsense:

Reverso uses the Ginger grammar-checking software, whose installed version offered exactly the same nonsensical stylistic alteration when used with Word. (Ginger is available in both free and premium versions: perhaps the latter would have identified the error, but somehow I doubt it.) Grammarly identified two ‘critical writing issues’, but wanted me to sign up for a free trial to obtain any details. One issue was shown under Plagiarism, which was fair enough. However, the other wasn’t listed as a Grammar error, but under Style and Word Choice, so I’m guessing that signing up would reveal the same ‘correction’ Reverso offered.

Let’s get back to the problematic sentence:

Just like we are now – safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies’ concerned.

The issue here is nothing to do with whether the possessive pronoun our is correct (it is), but the inexplicable apostrophe. What is it doing here? What is it for?

My best guess is that Max Brooks planned to write an abbreviation, and either failed to complete it or became tangled up in both singular and plural forms and the correct position of the abbreviating apostrophe. The intended sentence might thus be one of these:

Just like we are now – safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our body’s concerned.

Just like we are now – safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies’re concerned.

The first offering assumes plural bodies has been inserted accidentally in place of the notional singular form body, and that the intention was to write the contraction for body is. The second assumes that Brooks intended to telescope bodies are (cf. they’re), but somehow he omitted, or someone accidentally edited out, the crucial re.