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| Source: Just Like Us |
Businesses that don't bother checking their websites, journalists who write gibberish and balderdash, professionals who can't take the extra time and effort to spell-check and proofread, newspapers that turn tragedy into farce through solecisms, plus the odd guide to solving common grammatical difficulties… Contributions and suggestions welcome. (… Also corrections if required, obviously!) Send to: manglingenglishATgmxDOTcom, stating your nom de mangle (if desired).
Showing posts with label proofreading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label proofreading. Show all posts
Monday, 21 November 2016
Thursday, 23 June 2016
Not Washed or Cooked, # 313
Someone recommended to me The Disappearance, an eight-part French thriller shown on BBC4. The subtitles came with a glaring mangle:
Epiosde
Tuesday, 21 June 2016
Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 232
‘CitizenChip’, who might well hide behind a pseudonym, has mistaken the prepositional verb crack down on for the noun crackdown, both of which take the preposition on, and follows this up with some dubious syntax and a typographical error:
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| Link: GloucestershireLive |
Friday, 17 June 2016
Double-take, # 243
A mangled headline precedes and presages further mangling. In fact, the adverb in the report’s first paragraph, flagged by red text, is included as a variant form by Merriam-Webster, though not by British-English dictionaries. The report’s second paragraph is included here only to add colour:
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| Link: Daily Record and Sunday Mail |
Wednesday, 15 June 2016
Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 231
Clearly a mistype here, although arguably the word that should have been typed isn’t quite what’s meant either:
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| Link: The Scotman, ‘Edinburgh Man Accused of Mock Crucifixion of Co-worker’ |
Monday, 13 June 2016
Double-take, # 241
The mangles are bad enough, but given that Paris was submerged at the time (3 June, 2016) and the Louvre was sending key pieces offsite for safety, the verb ‘flood’ seems ill-chosen:
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| Link: Mirrorspectrum, ‘Media Blackout As France Witnesses Biggest Revolution in 200 Years’ |
Friday, 10 June 2016
You Cannot Be Serious, # 74
This fairly short piece of text is marked by confusion, due to a failure to proofread before posting — or since: the mangle, submitted by Dr Faustus a month ago was still in place as of this morning — and an absence of any of the hyphens required by the rules of grammar and for the sake of clarity, as well as inconsistency in the positioning of the registered trademark symbol:
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| Link: Vitae, ‘Vitae Three Minute Thesis competition’ |
Wednesday, 8 June 2016
Not Washed or Cooked, # 312
Tuesday, 7 June 2016
You Cannot Be Serious, # 73
From Mo Juste, who comments: ‘It looks like part of the old game show — “rearrange these words into a well known phrase or saying”.’
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| Link: Northampton Chronicle & Echo |
Monday, 6 June 2016
You Cannot Be Serious, # 72
These come via Gary Hazell. The top screenshot is taken of the company’s website (where one of the many mangles has now been corrected), and the other from its Facebook page. A cynic might say the copy had been rushed out to take advantage of circumstances:
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| Link: PhilosophyFootball.com, ‘Muhammad Ali’ |
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| Link: Facebook, PhilosophyFootball, 4 June, 2016, 10:42 |
Friday, 3 June 2016
Multimangle, # 53
A veritable cornucopia of mangles!
temerature, guideance, decorators cap, cle-aning, sea-ting, seperate
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| Link: Honeywell VT117 Traditional Flow Radiator Thermostat, ‘Installation and User Instruction’ leaflet |
Tuesday, 31 May 2016
Not Washed or Cooked, # 311
This mangle comes, via Dr Faustus, from an examination on the course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language offered by the Centre for Languages & International Education at University College London:
metholodology
Sunday, 29 May 2016
Not Washed or Cooked, # 310
Via Dr Faustus:
procratisnation
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| Link: The Independent, ‘Procrastination Makes You More Creative, Research Says’ |
Saturday, 28 May 2016
Friday, 27 May 2016
Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 230
Is this mangle a slip or an eggcorn? It comes from an item entirely based on an examination of posts on social media, a cheap, lazy and unsatisfactory method of ‘reporting’ that has now become ubiquitous:
| Link: The Express, ‘Paxman Praised for Shining Light on REAL EU but Europhiles Complain of “BBC BIAS”’ |
Wednesday, 25 May 2016
Multimangle, # 52
Many a mangle in this advertisement for the Fox Inn, Lutterworth:
resturaunt, extensiver, your'e [+ random capitalization, punctuation & syntax]
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| Link: Rugby Observer, 19 May, 2016, p. 16 |
Tuesday, 24 May 2016
Double-take, # 236
This seems improbable:
hops for hips [+ professor for Professor]
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| Link: MNT/Medical News Today, ‘Menopause Does Not Result In Weight Gain […]’ |
Monday, 23 May 2016
Not Washed or Cooked, # 309
From Just Liam comes this mind-boggling mangle. As is isn’t possible to determine how vacancies are uploaded and by whom, the perpetrator is not apparent, although the bonus mangle, from the same page, must certainly be the university’s own text:
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| Link: Indeed, ‘Instructor or Assistant Professer: UMD Department of History’ |
Professer; Smoking, chewing tobacco and the use of electronic cigarettes is prohibited
Saturday, 21 May 2016
Monday, 16 May 2016
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