Double-take, # 205

From the Dr Faustus backlog, here is a lovely bit of confusion from the ITV website:

Link: ITV.com, ‘Louisa Johnson sings her Winner'’s Song — Forever Young’

Louisa Johnson … his version

Double-take, # 200

Another mangled on-screen television programme guide entry (see here for an earlier one) for that cult classic series The Avengers. After the — erroneous — substitution of plural for singular in the first sentence, everything becomes very confused indeed:

peoples for people [+ general confusion]

Double-take, # 199

Vice Commodore Pugwash spotted this notice by a fire alarm at the Defence Academy, and is justly amazed by ‘glass which knows who is authorised to break it!’

Only authorised persons able to break glass

Multimangle, # 24

Here, via Dr Faustus, is a much and variously mangled blurb for the SWLondoner [sic]:

Link: SWLondoner, ‘Read the July edition of South West Londoner packed with news, features and entertainment’

Double-take, # 166

This is extracted from a genuine Google email, and is a useful reminder that a spell-checker can check only the accuracy of spelling, not the accuracy of content:

[email of 24/06/15 advertising Father’s Day offer ending 21/06/15]

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 80

Dr Faustus found this on Amazon:

Link: Amazon.co.uk, Marguerite Duras, The Lover, ‘From the Back Cover’

Despite appearing in the ‘From the back cover’ section of the page, the mangle is not the publisher’s, as a screenshot of the back cover on Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature shows:

Investigation has not revealed the origin of the error, which seems to date back several years, but it has certainly been disseminated widely over the Internet.

Link: Google search for "frances coveted prix goncourt"

Frances’ coveted Prix Goncourt

Double-take, # 124

It is hard to tell exactly what can have happened to this supposed television programme information, spotted by Des Pond of Slough:

The mangle here is, of course, ‘assistances’, although the whole thing turns out to be a mangle since the episode actually shown in this slot was from a much later series, in which the Avengers were John Steed and Mrs Emma Peel, not from the original 1961 series, which begins with a focus on a character called Dr David Keel, with assistance from the (definitely neither female nor plural) John Steed, who gradually takes over the lead role.

assistances for assistant/assistants

Double-take, # 120

Submitted by John Holloway (and a little later by Kieron Hayes), this is one of many questionnaires doing the rounds online, and here appears with the mangled Facebook wrapper:

As John points out, ‘Intelligence quotas are not percentages — and as for “your’s”!’
IQ 187%; your’s

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 35

Des Pond of Slough found a motor museum at the weekend. This is part of an exhibitor’s notice:

It’s not easy to work out how this verbal substitution occurred.
depute for debut

Double-take, # 51

The BBC doling out misinformation in series 4 of Shaun the Sheep:

Edited from screenshot of BBC iPlayer 21 February 2014.
Information now replaced by subsequent programming information

As Des Pond of Slough observes, a spider is not an insect.
a spider is not an insect