You Cannot Be Serious, # 32

Today, crass thoughtlessness brings inappropriate humour to a tragedy’s anniversary:

Link: Twitter, BBC News, ‘Before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami’

before and after [but showing after and before]

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 149

This extract contains a typographical error resulting in a very odd concept, and a spelling choice that suggests that Ilford has been relocated to the USA:

Link: Ilford Recorder, ‘Forest Gate Couple on Pedal-power Charity Trip to Paris’

The idea of vaccinating against polo is amusing here, but the error would be heinous in the context of a tragedy. The recasting of foetal (with the oe representing the ligature œ, as in fœtal) to fetal is puzzling; both Cambridge Dictionaries Online (CDO) and Merriam Webster, for instance, distinguish the spellings as British and North American variants respectively. Against the logic that suggests fetal should rhyme with metal and petal, CDO offers audio pronunciation guides in which both variants sound the first syllable as a long ‘e’. Yet altering a ligature to a plain vowel sometimes results in a shift in pronunciation, both visually and aurally distancing the word from its etymology. One example is paedophile, which in the USA is spelt pedophile and pronounced in its first syllable to rhyme with fed, not with feed.

polo for polio; fetal for foetal

Double-take, # 101

The masculine pronoun in the final line here would be better replaced by the name —

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Andy Murray appears distracted as he surrenders Wimbledon title’

— but the key issue is superfluity: can one look upset other than visibly?*

* The writer seems enamoured of the phrase, which reappears — with other verbatim sections of this report — the following day in a follow-up piece.

looked visibly upset

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 134

Here’s an example of a writer undermining the seriousness of a situation through lack of care:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘11 miners trapped in small goal mine in Honduras’

It’s now been corrected, but Des Pond of Slough wasn’t the only one to capture it for posterity. A Google search of "goal mine in honduras" finds 120 results that echo the original error, and it’s also enshrined in The Telegraph’s URL, linked above, which includes the story identifer ‘10945255/11-miners-trapped-in-small-gold-mine-in-Honduras.html’.

11 miners trapped in small goal mine in Honduras