The Wrong Word Entirely, # 97

Another pesky homophone (and a confused title):

Link: The Guardian, ‘In challenging homophobia, gay men have become our own oppressors’

routes for roots

Multimangle, # 42

This Google snapshot of its webpages suggests that J. D. Wetherspoon is having trouble harmonizing its corporate identity, amongst other things:

Link: Google search on ‘Wetherspoon’

Wetherspoon, founded in 1979 is a national chain across the whole of the UK & Ireland, with our award winning pubs & hotels, we are […]; Wetherspoon has […]; Wetherspoon have […]; Wetherspoon’ Pubs

Multimangle, # 38

Dr Faustus has found this piece of prose, which mangles grammar, syntax, punctuation and meaning:

Link: Generator, ‘More than a hostel’

your for you’re; shifting perspective; syntax; spacing

Multimangle, # 17

Let‘s hope that Dr Faustus chooses to study shorthand elsewhere — for this college‘s sake!

Incidentally, this is only a selection from the full range of mangles available on the website…

PA’s; administators; accurtae; theat for that

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 177

Dr Faustus has sent this extract from an emailed recruitment circular, which demonstrates a failure to proofread, an absence of logical hyphenation and an abrupt shift in perspective:

a supervisors; third person to second person shift

You Cannot Be Serious, # 35

This paragraph, with its dubious noun-verb agreements, shifting perspectives and overall bizarre syntax, directly quotes a person of seniority in tertiary education — Ed Byrne, the principal of King’s College London — making the case for maintaining levels of funding in tertiary education. Judging by this, it needs all the money it can get:

Link: The Times (subscription access only), ‘Labour’s tuition fee cut “would kill universities”’

 If £3,000 per student was […] one would destroy […] and one would make […]. Labour must identify clearly if […] and that university funding must not be reduced; &c

Mangling Meaning, # 11

Wise words, but a barely intelligible sentence from Mark Beatson, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development: 

Link: The Telegraph, '10 well paid jobs of the future'

The low-level punctuation can't necessarily be blamed on the speaker, though it still should have been corrected for publication; but the main winces are due to Mr Beatson's random shifting perspectives: what use are your good education and learning habits to your child's derailed career?

I also blenched at re-skill, but the OED advises that it's been around since at least 1937 (which doesn't make it any more attractive!), originally without a hyphen. It's not in Merriam-Webster at all, even though OED's earlier examples suggest it was coined in the USA.* 

* From the Chicago Tribune (1937); and in G. M. J. Veldkamp (in Western European Labor and the American Corporation, ed. A. Kamin (1970), vi. 437).

Now Try It In English, # 1

This is rather eye-watering:

Link: The Telegraph, 'poor families are likely to be obese'

 

The speaker is Anna Soubry, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health, who has previously worked in journalism and law.