Double-take, # 191

The preposition in this title is superfluous since the book (spotted in Aldi, as I recall) is about cooking for one’s friends and not, as the phrasing implies, having them round to help prepare food:

An internet trawl reveals that many compilers have use this title or some variation of it, but British-English and US-English dictionaries confirm that the verb takes a direct object.

Entertaining with Friends

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 90

The cover of a recently-published cookery book:

Anna Mae’s Mac N Cheese: Recipes From London’s Legendary Street Food Truck (London: Square Peg, 2015)

Mac N Cheese

Double-take, # 170

Dr Faustus has found a big white space and a forgotten placeholder on a global publishers’ graduate recruitment page. Recruitment is now closed, but if the page is to remain in place for reference, it would look better with the gap filled or removed:

Link: HarperCollins Publishers, Graduate Recruitment 2015-2016

Long Tail Video goes here

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

You Cannot Be Serious, # 36

It’s unclear whether Daniel Radcliffe is the originator of the mangle reproduced here, but the editors should have checked both the text and the index of first lines more carefully prior to publication. Unfortunately their failure is not confined to this book, but has been widely reproduced, so that Tony Harrison is now misrepresented as a grammatical incompetent and/or appalling proofreader all over the Internet:

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them, ed. by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden (New York: SImon & Schuster, 2014), p. 169. Link: Google Books

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, p. 301

you for your

Double-take, # 123

This mangle is surprisingly widespread and comes in at least these two variants, but there may be more. The first example is the more common error:

Link: NorthPole.com, Craft Cottage, ‘Poke a Dot Luminaries’

The second is less common, but not hard to find:

Link: Volcom.com, ‘Poker Dot Gloves’

The Oxford English Dictionary shows a pronunciation difference between UK- and US-English:

Spelling errors are thus more likely to be American. The term must, of course, be taught. If the l is not sounded, the correct spelling cannot be deduced from the sound; nor can it be inferred through logic, for, as the Online Etymology Dictionary points out, the connection between polka dots and the polka is arbitrary: the dance was popular and it became fashionable to append the name randomly.

An American company produces a series of ‘Poke-a-Dot’ books, intended to teach counting to young children:

Link: InnovativeKids, Our Products, ‘Poke-A-Dot’

The series title is a great pun; but a pun can be fun and effective only if it is understood as a pun. In practice, this series title is likely to consolidate the misspelling, and it is not impossible that the title is itself based on a misunderstanding of the term.

poke-a-dot; poker dot

Not Washed or Cooked, # 55

Today, a few examples of a rather common error, which should be flagged by any spell-checker and/or be picked up easily when proofreading.

The first is from the digital version of 2013 Songwriter’s Market:*

Link: Google Books: 2013 Songwriter’s Market

This one is from a page about available ‘Massachusetts Elementary and Secondary Education Data’ on the MassLegal Services website, and also includes ― or should that be inlcudes? ― a mangled and:

Link: MassLegal Services, ‘Massachusetts Elementary and Secondary Education Data’

The others are both from The Telegraph:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Bright young things with nowhere to shine’

Link: The Telegraph, ‘US banks attack Europe’s “Tobin Tax”’

Researching this, I came upon a rather jolly blog called Typo of the Day for Librarians, which sadly seems not to have been updated recently, but which covered today’s mangle, and further variants, on 30 July, 2008 and 20 March, 2013.

* Edited by Roseann Biederman. Blue Ash, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2012. The error appears on p. 186 of the printed version.

Double-take, # 11

Keeping on the subject of fauna, these are incredibly large tits – but only in imperial measurements:

Source: Rob Hume, RSPB Birds of Britain and Europe, rev. edn (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), p. 316

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 48

This book featured on 26 March, and I wondered whether more mangles would occur. This is unusual:

Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 202)

OED observes that glassier was one of several spelling variants for glazier in Middle English, although the sole example listed shows it used as an alternative to glazer, meaning a polishing tool or wheel, in 1688. I checked glassier in Merriam-Webster in case it was a usage specific to the USA, but it occurs only as a comparative form under the entry glassy.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 42

Today's mangle is taken from a book which is rather dogged by typographical errors:

 Link: Amazon.co.uk, L. J. Charles, A Touch of Ice (p. 12)

Refection, of course, is connected with refreshment and nourishment, so this unfortunate error might (depending on the reader) evoke anything from an image of nail-nibbling to a much less innocent suggestion of autoeroticism performed by someone extremely flexible…Either way, it should have been proofread out of the text before publication.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 13

Today's mangle is from the world of rock:

Appalling presentation from a well-known and long-established book publisher: Pan. The spelling is correct on the cover of the book, as shown not far to the left of the offending error… 

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 19

Continuing on from yesterday's new thread, this doesn't sound very appetizing; fortunately it's not a cookbook:

Link: South Asia Books, 'Salt Dessert'

The word is spelt correctly on the cover of the image used by the outlet, and twice in the blurb, so there's no excuse…