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

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 62

Pain is not inflicted solely by zombies in what turns out to be the second edition of this novel:

Source: Kristen Middleton, Zombie Games (Origins), 2nd edn e-book (self-published, 2012), p. 126

there for they’re

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 61

Possible, but improbable:

Source: Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 31

The word seise certainly exists, but, as both Oxford Dictionaries Online and Merriam Webster confirm, it is not a variant spelling of seize, but a legal term meaning ‘to be in possession of’. The context does not entirely preclude this meaning, but strongly suggests that seize (‘to take or lay hold suddenly or forcibly’) is what is intended here.

seise for seize

Not Washed or Cooked, # 124

I’ve noticed that Timothy Spall, in a television advertisement voiceover, pronounces the company name ‘Wickes’ as disyllabic, by doubling the first vowel. I thought it must be a ploy to draw attention to the name; but perhaps he’s simply reading from a mangled script…

Source: Robin Allen, If You Can’t Stand the Heat (Woodbury, NM, Midnight Ink, 2012), p. 70. Link: Google Books

agaiinst

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 36

Not the only example around of this glorious howler:

Source: Isa-Lee Wolf, Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), p. 138. Link: Amazon.co.uk

corporal for corporeal

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 32

I’m not going to flog this one, although there are many more variants out there. However, following on from yesterday’s mangle, it was hard to resist featuring a couple more accidentally well-educated body parts:

Source: Virginia Andrews, Scattered Leaves (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 46. Link: Google Books (eBook)

Link: Fitness Magazine [South Africa], Ben Greenfield, ‘Tips to tight and taught skin […]’

taught skin, taught lips

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 31

I came upon a version of this mangle on a website and wondered if it appeared in any books. Oh, yes:

Chris Coulter, The Deal (self-published through Xlibris, 2012), p. 60. Link: Google Books

That was but one of the results returned on a Google search that also offered the correct spelling:

Link: Google search, “taught buttocks”

If you click the Coulter link above you’ll get more (and more sexually explicit) context for the mangle, and it’s worth running the Google search just to see the term in various other (often sexually explicit) hilarious contexts. (Have I made the sexual explicitness warning clear enough?)

taught buttocks

Not Washed or Cooked, # 93

A sentence (and possibly a whole novel) untroubled by spellchecking or proofreading:

Barbara Cathey, Death of a Saleswoman, self-published (Authorhouse), 2004, p. 40. Link: GoogleBooks

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 96

Today, we return to Due Justice, a novel which has featured twice this year (on 19 September and 22 September) and whose Author’s Note, you may remember, suggests that the text has undergone a rigorous editing and proofing exercise. The first extract offers two mangles (or three, if you feel that the final sentence should be preceded by a comma, rather than a full stop; or several if you think the overall syntax is problematic):

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 210.
Link: Amazon.co.uk, LookInside

The second contains only one mangle, but it is a good one:

Diane Capri, Due Justice, p. 228

Double-take, # 29

The propensity for writers to begin sentences with qualifiers and subclauses, coupled with a lack of  lexical precision, sometimes leads to some odd propositions:

A. J. Braun, The Man With No Name, vol. 1: The Baby Hunters (A. J. Braun, 2013), chapter 1, paragraph 8.
Link: Amazon.co.uk, LookInside

The kitten referred to was Cat, not, as the construction ‘As a kitten, I […]’ suggests, the speaker. The speaker is a man, the Man With No Name of the title. He was never a kitten.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 95

Yesterday, ‘a “small ladies handbag”’. Today:

Source: Gemma Halliday, Viva Las Vegas (eBook edn © 2010, published in What Happens in Vegas). Link: Amazon.co.uk

Not Washed or Cooked, # 60

This book was featured last Thursday, with a suggestion that it might reappear… Here are two more ouch-inducing moments:

 Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy), p. 95. Link: Amazon.co.uk

 Diane Capri, Due Justice p. 119.

The Author’s Note contains a surprising statement:

 Diane Capri, Due Justice p. 312.

It’s not entirely obvious what heavily might mean in the context, but apparently it isn’t intended to equate to effectively, accurately or soundly. The born should not have made it through proofreading, and the tewnty suggests that the text hasn’t been through a spell-checker ― a process that a reader might fairly expect will occur before publication…

Mangling Meaning, # 22

This won’t, I’m afraid, be the last time we see this text. It’s one of the few occasions I’ve wished I could draw so as to be able to illustrate a mangle:

Diane Capri, Due Justice (Boise, ID: Stonegate, 2012. Previously published as Carly’s Conspiracy). Link: Amazon.co.uk

What is a suitable prize to give a fish?

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 19

The two examples of today’s mangle both occur in the reproduction of direct speech, one in a novel and the other in a news report. First, the fiction:

Kristen Middleton, Zombie Games (Origins). Self-published (2013), p. 185. Link: Amazon LookInside

There is no hint elsewhere that the writer is attempting to reproduce individual characters’ grammar usage, so this seems to be an unfortunate error.

The factual piece reports a supposed sighting of the so-called Beast of Trowbridge:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Beast of Trowbridge… or Alsatian?’

It’s improbable that Mr Smith provided his contribution in writing, so the report is more likely to be quoting from a face-to-face or telephone interview with the witness. Either Mr Smith correctly said would have, or possibly the contraction would’ve, and the reporter mangled the grammar into ‘would of’; or Mr Smith said ‘would of’, and the reporter failed to convert this idiosyncratic or dialectal usage into standard English, as would be customary in the British media.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 73

Given the generally sad reviews of the film World War Z, someone recommended that I read the original book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

Here’s a mangle from it:

London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2006, p. 209. Link: Google Books, ‘started to wretch’

The word wretch, as used in British and North American English, is a noun with various meanings, of which probably the best known relate to a miserable or unfortunate person, or a reprehensible one. OED also lists an obsolete verb, meaning 1) ‘To render miserable’ or 2) ‘To be or become niggardly or parsimonious’.

The correct spelling for the context is retch.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 13

A homophone has not been proofread out in the first sentence here. It’s unfortunate that the following paragraph mocks someone’s inaccurate spelling…

Link: Google Books, Linda S. Clayton, Just Buried

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 56

Twice it's wrong, and then suddenly it's right ― so why not correct the earlier ones?

Link: Google Books. Barbara Brink, Entangled

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 48

This book featured on 26 March, and I wondered whether more mangles would occur. This is unusual:

Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 202)

OED observes that glassier was one of several spelling variants for glazier in Middle English, although the sole example listed shows it used as an alternative to glazer, meaning a polishing tool or wheel, in 1688. I checked glassier in Merriam-Webster in case it was a usage specific to the USA, but it occurs only as a comparative form under the entry glassy.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 42

Today's mangle is taken from a book which is rather dogged by typographical errors:

 Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 12)

Refection, of course, is connected with refreshment and nourishment, so this unfortunate error might (depending on the reader) evoke anything from an image of nail-nibbling to a much less innocent suggestion of autoeroticism performed by someone extremely flexible…Either way, it should have been proofread out of the text before publication.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 38

Although I was a dab hand at calligraphy in the days before computers, I learnt early that I wasn't going to be someone who could draw. Most of the time I don't think about it; but I do wish I could do an illustration for today's mangle:

 Link: Robin Allen, If You Can't Stand the Heat (on Google Books)

The same error appears a couple more times in the book, but someone appears to have pointed it out to the author who, in the sequel, uses the term awning. Pity no-one noticed before it was published…