You Cannot Be Serious, # 68

It was going so well, but then the writer chose an adjectival construction instead of negating the verb, and it all went horribly wrong…

Source: Times Higher Education, 2253 (5—11May, 2016), p. 4

drones can carry only a small payload, let alone […]

Mangling Meaning, # 37

Incoherence verging on utter nonsense from The Express:

Link: The Express, ‘Outrage as Hotel Homes 300 Asylum Seekers — Without Telling Anyone’

asylum seekers have been housed in a major hotel without informing anyone; in what the authorities claim is on the sly

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 186

This error appears regularly in published works, and surprisingly often in academic books. More usually, only one part of the phrase is mangled, but today’s example follows through:

Robert A. Blank, The Price of Life: The Future of American Health Care (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 31. Online: Google Books

There are many more examples online: this morning, a Google Books search on the first part of the mangled phrase returned over 1,230 examples, and a search on the second part found over 1,060. A broader Google web search returned much higher results: 41,600,000 and 92,400,000 respectively. (In the latter case, the first two appear to be false positives, although these are likely to indicate an earlier error, now corrected.)

one the one hand; one the other hand

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 76

As Des Pond of Slough said, today’s mangle provides ‘Buckets of meaninglessness’:

Link: BBC iWonder, ‘How are serial killers caught?’ (6: ‘Debunking myths’)

Also notable is the byline, which states that the piece was not written, but ‘Authored by’ one John Bennett. The BBC’s iWonder (or, according to its logo, iW?nder) project was launched in March 2014 and was heavily trailed on BBC television. On launch day, the BBC’s internet blog explained: ‘BBC iWonder is a new factual and educational brand from the BBC, and it’s all about feeding the UK’s curiosity.’

pail into insignificance; authored by

Double-take, # 137

Ugly grammar:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Police from several UK forces seek details of Charlie Hebdo readers’

Since the customer is deemed human (‘who’), why not the newsagent? (Compare butcher, baker, candlestick-maker &c.) The relative pronoun ‘that’ would be correct were the writer referring to the business, but in that case ‘newsagent’ would need to take the possessive form — ‘a newsagent’s that’ — in which the possession, ‘shop’, is idiomatically omitted.

a newsagent that

Double-take, # 129

This seems a very odd construction to use in the context:

Link: The Sunday Times (subscription access only), ‘Superfit Jools eyes up 5th child’

For clarification, the article suggests that Jamie Oliver and his wife, Jools, may be considering an addition to their family. Oxford Dictionaries confirms that ‘eye up’ means ‘Look at someone in a way that reveals a particular, especially sexual, interest’; while Collins English Dictionary doesn’t offer a non-sexual variant, defining the term as: ‘to look at in a manner indicating sexual interest; ogle’ (eyes, number 40).
    Even without the sexual dimension, it would be difficult to ‘eye up’ someone who does not yet, and may never, exist.

Jools eyes up 5th child

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 56

Here’s a phrase that is increasing in popularity across the journalistic board:

Source: BBC News (Android), ‘EE to take over 58 Phones 4U stores’. Link: online version

Placing a company into administration for insolvency is a legal process that has to be organized. A company can thus enter administration, or go into administration, or be put or placed into administration. All these terms are used by financial professionals.

Logically, however, a company cannot fall into administration. Falling is an accidental, spontaneous action. It is thus not meaningful to apply it to the formal process of administration. To use fall not only sets up a contradiction within the phrase, but it also implies that the company has been lax in relation to its financial situation — ‘Oh heck! I’ve just noticed we’re on the edge of insolvency…’ — where it is far more likely to have been trying a range of measures short of administration to solve its problems.

It’s hard to see why this phrase came to be used.

fall into administration