The Wrong Word Entirely, # 99

A Good Friday mangle from the food database of a fitness website. It is not ultimately clear whether the misnaming of the foodstuff is due to a typographical error or to genuine confusion, but, as a bonus, the the name of the source is mangled too:

Link: myfitnesspal, ‘Calories in Wait rose Diet hot cross bum’

Wait rose Diet hot cross bum

Multimangle, # 42

This Google snapshot of its webpages suggests that J. D. Wetherspoon is having trouble harmonizing its corporate identity, amongst other things:

Link: Google search on ‘Wetherspoon’

Wetherspoon, founded in 1979 is a national chain across the whole of the UK & Ireland, with our award winning pubs & hotels, we are […]; Wetherspoon has […]; Wetherspoon have […]; Wetherspoon’ Pubs

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

You Cannot Be Serious, # 49

Dr Faustus observes that the BBC seems to be suffering from inconsistency in relation to a company name in this report, shifting between plain and possessive forms (the latter being incorrect). I’m inclined to add, forty-two years on from the UK joining the EEC and twenty-two years into its EU membership, that it is high time the British press learned that the final letter of Nestlé takes an acute accent — if other nations’ print and web media can accommodate diacritical marks, why can‘t the UK’s? Most companies, these two included, have an Internet presence nowadays, so there can be no excuse for not checking and using their correct names. There’s also a typographical error resulting in the wrong word (which a spell-checker wouldn’t find, but proofreading would, or should). Yet another mangle here is the omission of a possessive in the first line of the second paragraph, which refers specifically to the opinion of the presiding (and correctly unhyphenated) advocate general (compare ‘the judge’s opinion’ rather than ‘the judge opinion’) and not, as it is made to seem here, a particular kind of general opinion:

Link: BBC News, ‘Nestle faces setback in KitKat trademark battle’

Cadbury & Cadbury’s; Nestle; advocate-general opinion

Double-take, # 123

This mangle is surprisingly widespread and comes in at least these two variants, but there may be more. The first example is the more common error:

Link: NorthPole.com, Craft Cottage, ‘Poke a Dot Luminaries’

The second is less common, but not hard to find:

Link: Volcom.com, ‘Poker Dot Gloves’

The Oxford English Dictionary shows a pronunciation difference between UK- and US-English:

Spelling errors are thus more likely to be American. The term must, of course, be taught. If the l is not sounded, the correct spelling cannot be deduced from the sound; nor can it be inferred through logic, for, as the Online Etymology Dictionary points out, the connection between polka dots and the polka is arbitrary: the dance was popular and it became fashionable to append the name randomly.

An American company produces a series of ‘Poke-a-Dot’ books, intended to teach counting to young children:

Link: InnovativeKids, Our Products, ‘Poke-A-Dot’

The series title is a great pun; but a pun can be fun and effective only if it is understood as a pun. In practice, this series title is likely to consolidate the misspelling, and it is not impossible that the title is itself based on a misunderstanding of the term.

poke-a-dot; poker dot

Double-take, # 119

This product-name mangle dates back to the end of July, so I imagine it’s too late to snaffle the bargain:

Source: Rugby Observer, 31 July 2014, p. 44, and online

I initially assumed that the mangle had arisen because the drink had ceased to be made and long been forgotten, but it turns out that Babycham celebrated sixty years of manufacture last year. If you want to know what a Baby cham (or ‘baby cham’) glass looks like, there’s a picture in the BBC report on the anniversary.

baby cham