Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 226

From Dr Faustus comes this slip on the keyboard, preceded by some exceedingly bad syntax:

Link: BBC News, ‘La Familia Mexican drug cartel founder killed’

tears for years; the Christian military order of the Middle Ages of the same name

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 222

Ryan McCarthy spotted this on the menu at The Fox on The Hill, a Wetherspoon pub in Denmark Hill, London:

Cartmel for Caramel OR Cartmel sticky toffee pudding for Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding

Double-take, # 177

As Des Pond of Slough points out, the rather odd product name is only the beginning of the delights of this box of goodies, which he spotted in a Coventry branch of Aldi. Particularly noteworthy are the description of the product (at the lower right of the display packaging) and the rather strange wording in the circular flag next to the cowboy on the product box:

snack’n play [or snack’ n play?]; check backside for more fun; Hazelnuts spread and breadsticks with surprise

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 87

Dr Faustus has submitted this homophonic mangle, which is a fairly common error and which the blog has featured a few times. There is also a split infinitive, which some find inelegant at best, and the clarity of ‘support shirts’ seems dubious — support stockings I’ve heard of, but not shirts:

Link: The Huffington Post, ‘School Backtracks After Suspending Student […]’

principle for principal; support shirts; to automatically expel

Double-take, # 153

A caption spotted by Just Nick, featuring one mangle and a humorous ambiguity:

Link: BBC News, ‘The man who cut out his own appendix’

relaxing with one [of] Antarctica’s best known inhabitants [presumably the penguin]

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

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 161

Mangling at the BBC… again:

Source: BBC News for Smartphone, and online, ‘Samsung forecasts a 37% drop in quarterly profits’

manufactures for manufacturers

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 64

A confusing proposition from The Independent:

Link: The Independent, ‘Man banned from entering park on his own because of paedophile fears’

While the headline is clear, the report’s opening sentence suggests that the entry criteria are based on marital and parental status rather than immediate circumstances. In fact, the man who was denied entry is a parent (another piece of mangled English: ‘The grandfather and father of three grown up children’), which sets up a contradiction with the opening statement since he is likely to be married, divorced or widowed rather than ‘single’. Presumably the writer meant lone men or women unaccompanied by a child.

banning single men or women without children

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’

Double-take, # 13

This sentence, in a BBC News report on commemorating Magna Carta, is not best phrased:

Link: BBC News, ‘“Unclear” Surrey Magna Carta plans under spotlight’

The above screenprint was taken on 14 August, 2013, at 11:22. Someone has obviously recognized the phrasing as problematic, as the later edition (14 August at 15:36) has added punctuation:

Instead of removing the problem, this has emphasized it. Yet it could have been resolved quite easily by moving a single word to the previous paragraph and deleting the rest of the phrase:

You Cannot Be Serious, # 15

Last week's Rugby Observer surpassed itself with ambiguous headlines. Today, we'll feature this one:

Link: Rugby Observer, 'Teen sex website hailed a success'

In case you're wondering, the website is actually offering information about sex and relationships to teenagers…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 6

Bob Godiva contributed today's mangle, which had done the rounds in 2007 from the point of view of its unfortunate ambiguity, although no-one seems to have considered its appalling grammar or how that added to the ambiguity problem:

It's an issue that appears to arise with the informal, but sadly ubiquitous, term kids,* as this example from the bet-hedging Walmart rather emphasizes:

 Link: Walmart, kid's or kids'?

The term children, conversely, can be given a possessive apostrophe easily and accurately, as shown on the Constructive Playthings website:

Perhaps Kohl's, whose name suggests appreciation of the importance of apostrophes, should have chosen the more formal term in order to avoid inconsistency, a grammatical error and, given the grammatical issues, what turns into a potentially ambiguous statement:‡

Link: Kohl's, 'kids clothes'

Many, many more examples exist…

 * The OED finds this term in use in English as early as 1642, and notes that it was 'Originally low slang, but by the 19th c. frequent in familiar speech'. In the early nineteenth century, it was also used 'In low sporting or criminal circles [as a] term of admiration for an expert young thief, pugilist, etc.' In the UK, goat occurs in various metaphors, most of which relate to being foolish or behaving foolishly, which makes the ubiquity of kids even more puzzling.

‡ Let's ignore the syntactical illogicality of the product-type listing beneath 'expect great things'. 

Note: since the starting point, Target, is a firm operating in the USA, all of today's examples come from North American sources. This is not to say that firms in the United Kingdom or in other English-speaking places couldn't easily supply examples just as good/bad…