Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 194

Here, via Dr Faustus, is another mangle that only proofreading would flag:

Link: Wikipedia.org, ‘Constitution of the United Kingdom’

statue for statute

Double-take, # 158

Not strictly a mangle, but a distinctly odd alternative to suggest:

Link: OxfordDictionaries, search for "francocentric"

Frankenstein as substitute for Francocentric

You Cannot Be Serious, # 30

From a Travelodge poster on the London Underground:

Oxford Dictionaries confirms that this spelling hasn’t been acceptable since the Middle Ages, and proves a brief history of the word and its relation to until. (Unfortunately, its own examples of abbreviated usage include an open inverted comma in place of an apostrophe…) Oddly, both MS Word and Corel WordPerfect include til in their spelling dictionaries, although Word does flag it as an error if the US-English dictionary is selected.

til for till

Double-take, # 81

Dr Faustus sent this in because of a missing relative pronoun:

Link: Wikipedia, ‘Chivalric romance’

This mangle originates in a failure to harmonize the quotation, an error often seen in the work of some students, who merrily cut-and-paste text from the Internet into their essays without thinking to check whether the new material fits the immediate context syntactically — or to proofread the work later — and to adapt one or other if not.

It’s also notable that the plural pronoun that opens the second sentence (which is the second sentence of the entry, not just the extract) has no logical antecedent since no plural noun appears in the first sentence. Sometimes it is difficult to connect such orphaned pronouns with their subject noun. In this case, it is apparent what ‘They’ refers to, although it is strictly erroneous and also inelegant, and may require the reader to revisit the first sentence for clarification.

Writing should be accurate and coherent, with a smooth narrative flow. Readers should not have to proofread as they go to make the writing make sense.

missing relative pronoun; orphaned pronoun

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 131

A superb find by Des Pond of Slough:

Source: Geddes & Grosset Classical Mythology (New Lanark: Geddes & Grosset, 1997), p. 456

hugh fig tree

Not Washed or Cooked, # 120

This needed checking before posting:

Link: Wikipedia.org, ‘World War I in literature’ | Memoirs

armitice

Not Washed or Cooked, # 110

Another mangle from a source that should know better. You’d have thought the adjacency of the wrong and right spellings might have leapt to someone’s eye — until you notice that both the headings above the biography text erroneously refer to its subject as ‘Simone Beauvoir’…

Source: European Graduate School, ‘Simone Beauvoir [sic]—Biography’

Jean-Paul Satre, Simone Beauvoir

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 29

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a generally excellent reference work, although perhaps not thoroughly enough proofread for ‘A Peer-reviewed Academic Resource’:

Link: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Simone de Beauvoir (1908—1986)’

doctor’s for doctors

Not Washed or Cooked, # 84

Some of the inputters seem to have had problems with this address:

Link: Google Maps search for ‘riverside medical clinic london’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 31

The title of this site is pretty witty, but the typographical error here is eye-watering:

Link: Filmbuffet.com, 'Silimailr'