Not Washed or Cooked, # 305

Des Pond of Slough was looking at Portmeirion’s webcams for activities connected with the Prisoner Convention when he came upon this mangle:

Link: Portmeirion, Webcams — Town Hall Camera

Gazzebo

Not Washed or Cooked, # 292

The last day of misspellings of ‘appropriate’ brings several other mangles, including an idiosyncratic use of exclamation marks:

Link: GigSalad, ‘Amber Belly Dance’

apropreat; Resuraunt; Privet; Capavating; Parties of types! Night Clubs! Restaurants! Cultural Events! Country Club Events! Weddings!

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 198

From the backlog of Dr Faustus, who spotted this at the Tudor House in Southampton:

us for is

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 197

The first in an otherwise largely unproblematic list of activities (the other mangle was ‘patch work’ for ‘patchwork’) at a Warwickshire fete:

princes and princes competition

Double-take, # 183

Following on from yesterday’s post… I’d gone online to find out whether the website for the Rollright Stones placed an apostrophe in King’s Men, unlike the sign at the physical site, and was surprised to find this oddness (which continues further down the page than I've clipped here) on the page that introduces the various sets of stones: 

Link: The Rollright Stones, ‘The Stones’

Diagnosis: unedited/undeleted placeholders. These may or may not have been visible to the person inputting the text, but they would certainly have been visible to someone checking the page, before (preferably) or after making it live, a practice that should be routine and which, as these leftovers demonstrate, is essential.

Insert… Insert… [&c. Undeleted instructions]

Multimangle, # 26

The stone circle alluded to here certainly predates the apostrophe, and the name applied to it may well do, but the modern signage at the site does not and apostrophes consistently appear in the name on the official website (of which more tomorrow). It is also not apparent why the name here is treated as a plural when ‘The Rollright Stones’ — equally plural to the naked eye — takes singular verb forms on the website (where this name does not appear as a subject); nor why the superfluous singular subject noun in the first paragraph on the sign is treated as if plural:

Kings Men

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 77

Another pesky homophone — twice! — and the film title’s article seems to have fallen off too:

May the Forth

Not Washed or Cooked, # 186

Mangle-eyed readers will have noticed that, ‘the festive season’ being upon us, the blog has already featured a couple of Christmas-based mangles, and for the next week or so will focus on the seasonal theme.

In 2012, we had fun with various manglings of Santa and Claus, while 2013 was mainly concerned with mangles in Christmas songs. (These are all available in the blog’s archive.) This year, there’s a single mangle, but presented in increasingly appalling settings.

Today‘s spelling mangle, from the website of the Mattapoisett Historical Society in Massachusetts, is supported by a failure-to-hyphenate —

Link: Mattapoisett Historical Society, Events, ‘Drop In Christams Craft’

— that makes it seem at first to be reporting on a reduction in those making items associated with the season.

Drop In Christams

Not Washed or Cooked, # 177

Another excellent find by Dr Faustus, this mangle was on display at the Tudor House, Southampton:

Catherdrals

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 55

Evie McDermott has been to Alton Towers, where she was struck by the absence of apostrophe in the declarative announcement on this sign. Then there’s the completely random use of capital letters…

worlds most intense…; random capitalization

Double-take, # 88

These might be less startling with hyphens:

Source: Lavatory block at Cotswold Wildlife Park, Burford

unisex baby changing rooms

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 4

This is the footer from the homepage of the English version of 'the official website of the Parc Asterix':*

Link: Parc Asterix, English

I wish there'd been a character called Grammatix to evoke at this moment!

* Shouldn't that be Astérix? If you're a fan, have a look round the site; I don't know if there are more errors, but there's some interesting content, including pages on translations of the stories, though not enough have their own pages (Hebrew, Latin, Greek variants, Creole variants, and Picard do) if it's true that the books have been translated into more than 107 languages and dialects― more examples, please!

You Cannot Be Serious, # 12

Today's many-in-one mangle is contributed by Dr Faustus. Here's a plea from the London Dungeon:

Link: The London Dungeon, ' Henry VIII Infographic'

'Please share our infographic' is the request, and it would be churlish of us to refuse them. Here's the whole infographic, and below it are some selected mangles:

On its own, this would win the infographic a place in Apostrophe Catastrophe:

Arguably, however, there's a more heinous error:

Hmm: under 6½ inches tall, and yet weighing in at 300-320 pounds (that's approximately 21 stones or, for the metrically-minded, about 136 kilograms).

It's not apparent whether this idiocy was home-grown or taken from one of the high-quality resources credited: