Mangling Meaning, # 31

Going the rounds on social media (but original source unknown) is this assembly of mangled syntax and grammar, which, in nonsensically separating its prepositional ‘but’ from the clause it is supposed to qualify with end of sentence punctuation, manages to compromise its own point:

nonsensical ‘But’ starts sentence; changed for has changed; punctuation…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 71

Spotted at a car show last summer. The first line dealt correctly with its apostrophe, but then it all went wrong:

my minis the dogs bollocks

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 46

This has been going the rounds on Facebook, and I haven’t been able to trace its source. Given the system of pairings in the list, it seems clear that the wrong word has been chosen in the first pair:

Original source unknown

Complement has been mistaken for compliment. These words, identical bar the one vowel, have very different meanings. To borrow the definitions from Oxford Dictionaries, complement as a verb means to ‘add to something in a way that enhances or improves’, while compliment means to ‘admire and praise someone for something’.

OED shows that both derive from the same Latin root (complēmentum, meaning ‘that which fills up or completes’, from the verb complēre, ‘to fill up’), and come into English via French. It notes too that complement was sometimes used for compliment in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries.
complements for compliments

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 32

Variations on this have been doing the rounds for a while.* None has the apostrophe that is required, but this candidate (original source unknown) wins for inserting an extraneous apostrophe elsewhere:

Without the apostrophe, ‘hearts like dogs’ can be read in at least three ways:
1) ‘hearts like dogs [do]’ (i.e., dogs have hearts and people don’t); or

2) ‘hearts [that look] like dogs’ (i.e., hearts in the shape of dogs);† or

3) ‘hearts like [they have] dogs’ (i.e., kept hearts as pets).

* Several breeds are available.
† Another occasion when I wish I could draw… If you had a heart like a dog, which breed would it be?

hearts like dogs

Mangling Meaning, # 24

I haven’t been able to track down the source of this one, but it’s another grammatical fail: