Not Washed or Cooked, # 313

Someone recommended to me The Disappearance, an eight-part French thriller shown on BBC4. The subtitles came with a glaring mangle:

Epiosde

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 232

‘CitizenChip’, who might well hide behind a pseudonym, has mistaken the prepositional verb crack down on for the noun crackdown, both of which take the preposition on, and follows this up with some dubious syntax and a typographical error:

Link: GloucestershireLive

crack down for crackdown; of for on; area for area; [syntax]

Double-take, # 241

The mangles are bad enough, but given that Paris was submerged at the time (3 June, 2016) and the Louvre was sending key pieces offsite for safety, the verb ‘flood’ seems ill-chosen:

Link: Mirrorspectrum, ‘Media Blackout As France Witnesses Biggest Revolution in 200 Years’

protestor for protestors; The first collaborative protest against the Socialist government since Hollande came to power in 2012, kicked off on 9 March

You Cannot Be Serious, # 74

This fairly short piece of text is marked by confusion, due to a failure to proofread before posting — or since: the mangle, submitted by Dr Faustus a month ago was still in place as of this morning — and an absence of any of the hyphens required by the rules of grammar and for the sake of clarity, as well as inconsistency in the positioning of the registered trademark symbol:

Link: Vitae, ‘Vitae Three Minute Thesis competition’

by the until the end of June; Three Minute Thesis competition; Vitae hosted

Not Washed or Cooked, # 312

A glaring mangle in a large font in a display box — you’d have thought someone would have noticed in time:

Source: Towpath Talk, 127 (May 2016), p. 21

reasaonble

You Cannot Be Serious, # 73

From Mo Juste, who comments: ‘It looks like part of the old game show — “rearrange these words into a well known phrase or saying”.’

Link: Northampton Chronicle & Echo

Northampton to restoration of the monarchy in 1660 with Oak Apple Day service

Not Washed or Cooked, # 310

Via Dr Faustus:

Link: The Independent, ‘Procrastination Makes You More Creative, Research Says’

procratisnation

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 230

Is this mangle a slip or an eggcorn? It comes from an item entirely based on an examination of posts on social media, a cheap, lazy and unsatisfactory method of ‘reporting’ that has now become ubiquitous:

Link: The Express, ‘Paxman Praised for Shining Light on REAL EU but Europhiles Complain of “BBC BIAS”’

bias for biassed/biased

You Cannot Be Serious, # 69

The caption-writer either doesn’t understand the term ‘clockwise’ or needs to learn to check details before posting… This was spotted by Dr Faustus, who explains: ‘If the photos were correctly read clockwise from top left, the bottom two pictures should be swapped over. Result: unintentionally hilarious image of the Mad Hatter as a new X-Man’ — so crossed streams after all?

Link: The Guardian, ‘Scorchers: The Hottest Films of Summer 2016’

misordered caption – X-Men/Alice crossover]

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 105

The writer knows what the right word is, as it appears in the final paragraph here, but the word used in second paragraph makes little sense, as Dr Faustus observes. There’s a hyphen missing too:

Link: BBC News, ‘Britons with “wrong passport” stopped from travelling to US’

biometric trip [for chip]; old style passport

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 212

A couple of avoidable mangles, via Dr Faustus:

Link: Bettany Hughes, Historian, Author, Broadcaster, ‘About Bettany’

100 Global Woman; his written extensively

Double-take, # 206

Using countries’ names adjectivally often feels odd and is arguably ungrammatical, and much more so with acronyms… and that’s not even the mangle here!

Link: The Telegraph, ‘The history of Guide Dogs for the Blind’

trained the first-ever UK and

Double-take, # 204

Some better than others might have been a better response in this case given the grammatical mangle arising from inaccurate reproduction of the quotation, possibly coupled with unfamiliarity with the English second-person singular:

Link: Richard Bowker, Dover Beach (Shrewsbury, PA: ePublishing Works!, 2012) at Google Books

are thou

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 211

Submitted by Dr Faustus:

Link: BBC News, ‘US FDA partially lifts gay men blood donation ban’

counties for countries

Multimangle, # 28

Dr Faustus sent this in for Singular or Plural?, highlighting the second paragraph’s nasty noun-verb disagreement. I’ve also kept the previous paragraph in the screenshot, which supplies a range of mangles, including the failed past participle, the nonsensical order of the first two clauses which, as it stands, expresses a chronological impossibility, and also the use of an indicative (‘is’) where a subjunctive would make more sense. The BBC’s own version of the text has now been considerably altered by further editing, but the text as originally published can be found via a Google search:

Link: BBC News, ‘China’s yuan gains IMF reserve status’

have suggest; concerns […] is; If Beijing’s wish is granted later on Monday, some analysts have suggest that by 2030 […]

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 92

This was submitted by John Holloway, with the caption ‘Horseplay at Skyscanner?’ It is a companion mangle to one featured last year (12 April, 2014). It may be a typographical error; this time there is certainly no possibility of allowing it as an eggcorn:

Link: Skyscanner, ‘Carry on: readers’ opinions on cabin luggage restrictions’

confusion reins

Double-take, # 201

Des Pond of Slough is puzzled by a word in a news report, though clearly not as puzzled as the reporter. There is also the matter of the use of both ‘curly’ and ‘straight’ quotation marks. Is this accidental, or are they intended to convey some nuance?

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Secret Russian radioactive doomsday torpedo leaked on television’

asymetically [+ curly & straight quotation marks]

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 206

John Holloway finds a homophonous mangle in a manufacturer’s survey. Some quotation marks seem to have escaped too:

here for hear; quotation marks missing

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 103

Dr Faustus comments: ‘I don't think I’ve ever seen this one before!’ It is an oddity indeed:

Link: BBC News, ‘“Trojan Horse”: Park View pupils “fed diet of Islam”’

The item has been tacitly rewritten since its original posting on 16 November, 2015 and the report as it now stands has clearly been much extended. While no reference to subsequent editing is made on the BBC‘s page, Newssniffer has archived an early change, together with the original report.
Mr’s Ahmed conduct

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 205

Mo Juste comments: ‘As a keen supporter of Northampton Town Football Club, I’ve been following recent developments, but it’s hard to know when the administration petition will be heard according to this headline’ — when or even whether!

Link: Northampton Chronicle & Echo, ‘Administration petition for Northampton Town […]’

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