Singular or Plural? # 19

Spotted by Dr Faustus at Locksbridge Park, a new housing development in Andover:

The early bird gets the house they want

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

Not Washed or Cooked, # 144

Source: Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Comparative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 165

A Google search reveals that activites often congregate in this way…

activites

Double-take, # 67

This supposed quotation is doing the rounds on Facebook. Headlining is an eyewatering syntactical swerve, with support from a shift in logic and some odd punctuation:

Out of interest, I ran the offending sentence through Word’s grammar-checking function (both the UK and US versions), together with a control.

Only the control error was flagged.
in a time, where if something was broke, you fixed it … not throw it away

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 40

This extract comes from an article posted on a telecommunications company’s intranet. The key mangle — Cf. this mangle from last year — may be a misapprehension or a typographical error:

 free reign; practise for practice

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 34

It’s not clear who mangled the number of wits in this rather bizarre statement from a letter to The Times’s Troubleshooter column:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), Troubleshooter, ‘BT worse than flood’

Oxford Dictionaries confirms that wits should be pluralized.
wit’s end