Amongst his recent submissions, Dr Faustus, who has kept us entertained all week, sent in a screenshot of a (locked) webpage describing a module offered by the University of Warwick. The page is rather generously supplied with errors, so I thought we might focus on the one that made Dr Faustus most annoyed. It’s another of those pesky homophones that arise fairly often on the Mangling English blog:
Other departments offer this error to the general public. This example is particularly reprehensible, given that the correct word is shown in the category bar on the left:
The erroneous usage of principle for principal turns out to be appallingly common on official university webpages. Try looking through the results of an Internet search, such as the one shown below, based on a set search term (“principle aims of”) that is unlikely ever to be correct:*
You would also think that a librarian would know the difference:
The abstract supplied on the page uses the correct word five times, and it also appears in the appended list of subject index terms. It is, of course, correct on the title page of the dissertation:
It isn’t just universities. This head teacher, for instance, has hedged his bets:
The problem is found in other professional contexts too. Headline writers at the Vancouver Sun should surely know better:
Nicely doubled up there for emphasis… but perhaps they were dutifully copying what they had been given by performance arts agencies, some of which also have trouble with the term:
The error can be found on websites promoting performances too. This one, from the cast page of a site advertising an impending tour of an Irish dancing show, also includes a couple of catastrophic apostrophes:
The final two examples tidily bring us back to the beginning of this mangle by joining performance arts and universities. This is from website of the State University of New York:
Finally, the University of East Anglia offers another singer, together with a nasty grammatical slip:
**
It’s good to know that there are so many principles out there. What a shame so many have nothing to do with good writing and presentation… and no guesses for what tomorrow’s mangle will be.
* If anyone can think of a context in which it would be correct, please let me know and I'll happily amend the page accordingly.
** As the Oxford Dictionaries entry confirms, the simple past form of the verb sing is sang, not sung, which is the past participle.
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