Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 96

Today, we return to Due Justice, a novel which has featured twice this year (on 19 September and 22 September) and whose Author’s Note, you may remember, suggests that the text has undergone a rigorous editing and proofing exercise. The first extract offers two mangles (or three, if you feel that the final sentence should be preceded by a comma, rather than a full stop; or several if you think the overall syntax is problematic):

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 210.
Link: Amazon.co.uk, LookInside

The second contains only one mangle, but it is a good one:

Diane Capri, Due Justice, p. 228

Double-take, # 29

The propensity for writers to begin sentences with qualifiers and subclauses, coupled with a lack of  lexical precision, sometimes leads to some odd propositions:

A. J. Braun, The Man With No Name, vol. 1: The Baby Hunters (A. J. Braun, 2013), chapter 1, paragraph 8.
Link: Amazon.co.uk, LookInside

The kitten referred to was Cat, not, as the construction ‘As a kitten, I […]’ suggests, the speaker. The speaker is a man, the Man With No Name of the title. He was never a kitten.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 95

Yesterday, ‘a “small ladies handbag”’. Today:

Source: Gemma Halliday, Viva Las Vegas (eBook edn © 2010, published in What Happens in Vegas). Link: Amazon.co.uk

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 24

The logical continuation of yesterday’s problematic principles for principals is, of course, principals for principles. Here is a lovely example from an academic text:

Beverly M. Black and Arlene N. Weisz, ‘Effective Interventions with Dating Violence and Domestic Violence’, in The School Services Sourcebook: A Guide for School-based Professionals, ed. by Cynthia Franklin, Mary Beth Harris, Paula Allen-Meares (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 519–28 (p. 522). Link: GoogleBooks. The same editorial team included this essay, with the error corrected, in The School Practitioner's Concise Companion to Preventing Violence and Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 127–39 (p. 132). Link: GoogleBooks.

Today’s second mangle is taken from promotional material advertising a book called Bottom Line Focus by one Marty Harshberger (available from his website Bottom Line Coach, which offers a fair selection of mangles), and you’ll note it has brought a friend:

Link: bottomlinecoach.com, Bottom Line Focus

If I were to compile a Mangles of the Year list, I’m fairly sure ‘lawsuites’ would appear in the top three… Bliss!

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 73

Given the generally sad reviews of the film World War Z, someone recommended that I read the original book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

Here’s a mangle from it:

London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2006, p. 209. Link: Google Books, ‘started to wretch’

The word wretch, as used in British and North American English, is a noun with various meanings, of which probably the best known relate to a miserable or unfortunate person, or a reprehensible one. OED also lists an obsolete verb, meaning 1) ‘To render miserable’ or 2) ‘To be or become niggardly or parsimonious’.

The correct spelling for the context is retch.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 42

Today's mangle is taken from a book which is rather dogged by typographical errors:

 Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 12)

Refection, of course, is connected with refreshment and nourishment, so this unfortunate error might (depending on the reader) evoke anything from an image of nail-nibbling to a much less innocent suggestion of autoeroticism performed by someone extremely flexible…Either way, it should have been proofread out of the text before publication.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 38

Although I was a dab hand at calligraphy in the days before computers, I learnt early that I wasn't going to be someone who could draw. Most of the time I don't think about it; but I do wish I could do an illustration for today's mangle:

 Link: Robin Allen, If You Can't Stand the Heat (on Google Books)

The same error appears a couple more times in the book, but someone appears to have pointed it out to the author who, in the sequel, uses the term awning. Pity no-one noticed before it was published…