Mangling Meaning, # 30

One from John Holloway. He didn’t say where he found it, but he did comment: ‘Preposition errors can make SUCH a difference to the meaning!’

coming at my home

Mangling Meaning, # 28

The odd phrasing here leads to an unlikely, unpleasant and erroneous premise:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Husband and wife found dead in suspected murder-suicide’

The combination of ‘is accused’ and ‘before’ suggests a cause and effect scenario which is not — this being journalism — negated by the shift of tense from the headline to the subhead. Someone who is dead cannot be ‘accused’ in the sense of being charged with an offence; but the only other meaning of the word (see Oxford Dictionaries), to claim someone has done something wrong, is also illogical: as the circumstances are as yet uncertain, it cannot be firmly asserted that events transpired as stated here. Perhaps the writer should have changed the verb and used one of those spare allegedlys from last week.

A […] man is accused of killing his 73-year-old wife in the bedroom before taking his own life

Double-take, # 127

I‘ve seen several examples of these cut-off-before-the-end mangles recently. Some render the text completely meaningless; this one results in an accidental paraprosdokian:

Source: The Daily Telegraph, 15 November, 2014, p. 19

paid at least [end cut off]

Double-take, # 89

This is a section of an advertisement that runs regularly in the Rugby Observer:

Link: Rugby Observer, 7 August 2014, p. 2

As an aside, I’ve noticed only recently that the publication has dropped the direct article from its masthead, although I’m almost positive that it used to be shown. The website’s address includes it, and the copyright details also show ‘The Rugby Observer’. The potential broad application of the noun seems to require greater specificity, and it’s certainly customary.

up to a huge £75 minimum