Double-take, # 248

The mangled headline is just the beginning:

Link: Rugby Adverttiser

[headline but no report, or pictures, or anything]

Double-take, # 230

The writer of this report seems not to understand that a whole word does not work the same way as its abbreviation, and needs a space:

Link: Express, ‘Private Contractors Cost NHS, and Taxpayers, Millions in Botched Operations’

£9million, £3.2million, £33million, £52million; failures […] has

Singular or Plural? # 18

Presently going the rounds online is this confusion of grammatical number. It started so well…

poverty and low pay were […] It was

Singular or Plural? # 17

Someone in Sainsbury’s sign-writing department seems confused about grammatical number, and varying the order of the nouns doesn’t help:

chicken and beef is; beef and chicken is

Other Englishes, # 1

The first of two days of lovely scam emails. Such scams are another reason (if one were needed) to teach, learn and use good English, and to read properly instead of skim, so that recipients can determine when they are being scammed; this is especially important when scammers’ offerings are made to look convincing with logos and apparently official email addresses:

As is often the case, the key errors in this email are verb tenses and grammatical number, although there are some odd prepositions here too, and ’prevent’ has been used as if it were a direct synonym of ’protect’.

by for from [x2]; introduce for [has] introduced; prevent for protect; restore for restored; remove for removed; field for fields

You Cannot Be Serious, # 51

This pair of adjacent Twitter posts fits nicely into an ongoing thread (here and in discussion on the blog’s Facebook page) on notional agreement, most recently featured last weekend. The contributor, Des Pond of Slough, comments: ‘At least they’re consistent. Kinda sorta.’

Link: Twitter.com, Warwickshire Police, 20 August 2015

unit have; are one

Multimangle, # 23

No-one seems to have proofread this text (contributed by Dr Faustus), which comes from the Best Western Hotel, Findlater Place, Dublin:

pre authorisation (x4); Pre authorisation are; thought for though

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 185

The writer of this piece starts by insulting anyone who obtained a degree at one of Coventry’s two universities more than a decade ago by entitling his article ‘Ten things you couldn’t do in Coventry ten years ago’ and then heading the first of his offerings ‘Get a first-rate education’. The text in this section goes on to mangle a key word and to use both a singular and a plural verb form with the same subject, as well as adopting a repetitive narrative formula:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Ten things you couldn’t do in Coventry ten years ago’

Unviersity; University of Warwick keeps; University of Warwick are

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 184

Noun-verb disharmony, easily avoided by proofreading, and an illogical preposition:

Link: Bucks Free Press, ‘Radnage residents fight against plans to turn the Three Horseshoes pub into a house’

plans […] was

Not Washed or Cooked, # 230

Just Nick has found a messy sentence in a BBC report (now partly corrected):

Link: BBC News, ‘Plucking hairs “can make more grow”’

What the findings means for people plucking their eyebrows is uncertains

Double-take, # 145

A nasty case, including singular-as-plural, a syntactical minefield, and some punctuation overkill:

Source: Rugby Observer (20 November, 2014), p. 16, and online

Are your agency […]?? [PMP Recruitment]

Singular or Plural? # 15

Following on nicely from Wednesday’s ill-formed and verbose headlines and yesterday’s two-nouns-with-singular-verb comes another grammatically suspect and overlong headline, spotted by Des Pond of Slough:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Prince Charles letters […]

A panel of seven senior judges are

Singular or Plural? # 14

John Holloway has sent in ‘a mangle from Wiltshire police’:

drinking and drug driving costs lives

Double-take, # 74

This Guardian writer is horrified by implicit gender stereotyping in some primary school homework. It’s a fair concern; but the hideous confusion of pronouns seems a greater problem than the font face. Surely politically-correct grammar only has any claim to validity if it’s consistent?

Link: The Guardian, ‘Young children must be protected from ingrained gender stereotypes’

he … they; they … wife

You Cannot Be Serious, # 35

This paragraph, with its dubious noun-verb agreements, shifting perspectives and overall bizarre syntax, directly quotes a person of seniority in tertiary education — Ed Byrne, the principal of King’s College London — making the case for maintaining levels of funding in tertiary education. Judging by this, it needs all the money it can get:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Labour’s tuition fee cut “would kill universities”’

 If £3,000 per student was […] one would destroy […] and one would make […]. Labour must identify clearly if […] and that university funding must not be reduced; &c

You Cannot Be Serious, # 28

From the second paragraph of a report on inputting bank details incorrectly:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Call to help “fat-fingered” retrieve their lost millions’

What here could possibly suggest that a singular verb form might be appropriate?
Millions of pounds is

Singular or Plural? # 12

Grammatical-numerical confusion:

Link: The British Postal Museum & Archive, ‘ The Post Office and the First World War’

a half pence

Singular or Plural? # 11

The reversal of the standard subject—verb order, coupled with the lengthy subordinate clause, may have confused matters in this sentence, whose main subject and verb do not agree:

George Ritzer, ‘Introduction’ to Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. by Chris Turner (London, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi: Sage, 1998), p. 16. Link: GoogleBooks

Within his body of thought on consumption […] is Baudrillard’s ideas

Double-take, # 92

This is well-meant, if oddly couched:

Link: Teach First

Since ‘a day’ relates to time, not place, to use where in this context is completely illogical.

The word child is grammatically both singular and neuter (cf. baby), biologically sexually unspecific and culturally non-gender-specific; it would thus be more correct and more logical to use the pronoun its to represent the noun. If it were being applied to a particular child in a particular context, it could be sexed accordingly. If the noun were made plural, their would make greater sense and be more grammatically sound; it might also increase the the statement’s emphasis. As it is, it reads rather as if their was agreeing in number with parents rather than child.

a day where; no child … their

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 141

A certain lack of harmony between noun and verb:

Source: Rugby Observer, 26 June 2014, p. 9. Link: online version

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