Double-take, # 229

Some time ago, Dr Faustus submitted this shot of a mangle from the printed Radio Times (edition unknown). A search on its website suggests that this mangle occurs quite often in the publication:

The ‘i before e’ issue was addressed by Mangling English in December 2012.

fiesty

Not Washed or Cooked, # 263

Dr Faustus points out that today’s submission is especially reprehensible because of its source: a college that specializes, according to its logo, in ‘courses in proofreading, journalism, writing and marketing’. The mangles — a misspelling and a noun pretending to be an adjective — come from its page outlining the NCTJ [National Council for the Training of Journalists] diploma:

Source: The College of Media and Publishing. ‘Do the NCTJ diploma with the experts’

receive; specialist for specialized

Not Washed or Cooked, # 261

This seems a novel way of avoiding the ‘i before e’ problem:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Motorist fined after council workers lifted her car onto double yellows’

recevied

Not Washed or Cooked, # 99

Link: ebay.co.uk, ‘TRODAT DATE STAMP […]’

I hope not! The word is correct everywhere else on the page, but I can’t decide whether that makes this mangle better or worse…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 81

More evidence that The Telegraph’s finance and business writers can’t spell, and can’t or won’t use a spellchecker:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Fitch threatens to strip America of “AAA” credit rating’

Odd that ‘ceiling’ is right…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 76

Yet another variant in the ‘i before e’ category:

Link: The Rugby Observer, 20 June, 2013, p. 7

Not Washed or Cooked, # 72

Dr Faustus has been emailed a special offer with a bonus mangle. It’s a brand-new way to deal with that old i before e problem:

Not Washed or Cooked, # 49

Here’s an old friend:

Link: The Surrealists, ‘Recieves grace [sic] by Yves Tanguy’

So recieves appears for receives, while the punctuation needs work: a comma is needed before by. 

There’s another issue here which we’ll come back to sometime soon: when did titles stop being presented as titles and start being treated as plain phrases or sentences? (The missing comma above accentuates the issue in this case.) You don’t expect to see book conventions (generally titles italicized for long/big works, or placed in quotation marks for smaller ones) followed everywhere, but titles used to have capital letters on the key words (mainly, but not exclusively, nouns and verbs) — that’s how you know they are titles and which words are in the title. The practice seems to be dying out, even including in some books and academic publications; and (unsurprisingly) the result is that it is frequently difficult to distinguish titles from surrounding text…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 62

It’s great to know that The Boss is as good as ever, but Brucefan has flagged a problem, in huge letters, on Bruce Springsteen, The Official Bruce Springsteen Website:

Link: http://brucespringsteen.net | June 17, 2013

Not Washed or Cooked, # 22

Good to see the Grauniad back on form at the weekend, fighting off competition from the Tolygroff:

Link: Guardian, 'Shopkeeper uses wooden stool to fight off armed robber – video'

Not Washed or Cooked, # 19

We addressed the order of e and i in December, but here it is again, and not for the last time.

Today's example, provided by Dr Faustus, offers a discount off a text that we can only hope was spell-checked and proofread before it was published by this 'independent media company and nexus of travel culture worldwide', now moving into book publication:

 Link: Matador, No Foreign Lands

Oddly, the page now has a popup repeating the promotion information, but this time correctly spelt:

There's quite a lot of material in the How to Write sections on the site; this covers travel writing, dealing with editors, finding a voice, and other useful issues, but I could find nothing on using a spell-checker or proofreading. Maybe you only get that if you enroll on the 'travel writing course from MatadorU'. (That's 'U' as in University.)

I before E, or E before I?

Lots of people seem to have trouble spelling words that contain the vowel combinations ei and ie. Combinations like these, with a pair of vowels treated as a single syllable, with a simple sound, are called digraphs or monothongs.

I don't know how it's taught in other countries, but in the UK there's a mnemonic, 'i before e except after c'. Since it's only true for some words, it really doesn't help, and may indeed be why so many people have trouble correctly spelling words that include the ei and ie digraphs… 

The bad news is that there's no absolute rule that works for all words with the ie and ei combination, but there is a rough test that can be used to sort out quite a few. (The others just have to be learned or avoided.)

The test is based on the sound the digraph makes (and in the examples below, on British-English pronunciation).

1. If the sound the digraph makes in the word is ee (rhyming with feet), the 'i before e except after c' rule usually works:

• belief, believe, besiege, brief, cashier, chief,* chieftain, field, grief, grievous, lief, piece, pierce, priest, relief, relieve, reprieve, shriek, sieve, siege, thief, thieve, yield

*handkerchief and mischief work like chief, though they are not pronounced with the ee sound for ie

• ceiling, conceit, conceive, deceit, deceive, perceive, receipt, receive

2. If the sound the digraph makes is not ee (a sound other than ee), the spelling order is usually ei:

• eider, eiderdown, eight, foreign, forfeit, freight, heifer, heir, leisure, neigh, neighbour, reign, rein, skein, sleigh, their, veil, vein, weight, weir, weigh

3. The irregularities: learn them or learn to avoid them…

• ancient, feisty, fierce,* friend, seize, species, weird*

*strictly speaking, the ei in weird and the ie in fierce are not digraphs but diphthongs (a combination of two vowels that requires the mouth to move to a new shape), but for spelling purposes they can be included in this list

Always use a spellchecker and/or a dictionary to check the spelling if you aren't sure.