You Cannot Be Serious, # 60

There are presently several versions of this meme, which appears on car-window decals and in other formats in addition to the ubiquitous online graphics. Most seem to contain this hideous mangle:

Link: Facebook, Janoskians

miss spell

Double-take, # 180

This pair of mangles (and some dubious punctuation) comes from an estate agents’ description of a property:

Link: Rightmove, Edward Knight (Elizabeth Way, Long Lawford, Rugby, Warwickshire)

is two sheds and a green house; punctuation

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 87

Via John Holloway, a missing apostrophe and a missing space:

Stewards Flat; Thankyou

Double-take, # 154

Takeaway has long been accepted as a compound, so it now looks strange as separate words; but it’s the attraction of the telephone that’s the puzzle here:

Link: The Rugby Observer, 20 December, 2014, p. 8, and online

bookings for telephone; take away

Multimangle, # 16

The rest of this week belongs to Dr Faustus, who is having to work much harder than he‘d imagined in his search for a shorthand system and (coming soon) a credible and creditable shorthand school.

Here‘s ‘[a]mbitious journalism student, Alex Cooper, introduc[ing] us to Teeline Shorthand with his debut guest post for Bad Language’ — Bad Language being ‘The Articulate Marketing Blog’, a blog on the website of Articulate__Inbound Content Marketing [sic]. Or is it Alex Cooper? Confusingly, the post is headed ‘How to write faster — learn Teeline shorthand By Matthew Stibbe’. Blame for the many mangles is thus not easy to apportion:

Link: Articulate__Inbound Content Marketing, ‘How to write faster – learn Teeline shorthand’

stream line; langauge; principal for principle

Double-take, # 132

John Holloway spotted this in Tesco in Colchester:

John asks: ‘Is it “stir fries” or “stirfrys”? I feel as though it should be the former.’

Standard dictionaries don’t show a plural, which suggests that the term follows normal English rules, with one fry becoming multiple fries. Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries and Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary confirm this, but all sources checked show that the term should be hyphenated: stir-fry and (where shown) stir-fries.

stir frys [noun]

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 140

From a home-goods catalogue:

Link: Lakeland, ‘Extendable Cob Web [sic] Duster’

Cob web but not Lake land or extend able? It’s also worth observing that the descriptor in the text should be treated as a generic singular (goat’s hair) and, since it’s used adjectivally, hyphenated (goat’s-hair).

cob web; goats’ hair duster

Not Washed or Cooked, # 136

The bulleted list begins with a separated compound, ends with a major mangle and is sprinkled with random capital letters:

Link: Amazon, ‘White Reusable Muslin Bags […]’

Draw Strings; random capitalization; sticthings