Double-take, # 223

The Express apparently driving the point home in February 2016 in this headline (now changed):

Link: The Express, ‘Right-wing fascists bring Liverpool to a standstill as violence erupts’

Later in the report came this gem:

Aside from the omission of the crucial hyphen (and why ‘right-wing’, but not ‘far-right’?), the verb ‘carrying out’ applied to saluting seems very odd, in a way that ‘performing’, or even ‘doing’, might not.

Right-wing fascists; carrying out far right salutes

Not Washed or Cooked, # 294

Accompanied by a superb example of superfluous illustration, this mangle has now been corrected:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Gang pockets thousands of pounds after doctoring private school bills, police warn’

Hamsptead

Not Washed or Cooked, # 293

Just Nick is less than impressed with Warwick University’s proofreading skills (while the award’s full title sounds as if Derek Zoolander — of The Derek Zoolander School for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Want to Do Other Stuff Good Too — invented it):

Link: The University of Warwick, Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATE) — WATE PGR Information

Eligilibitly; the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates Who Teach

Double-take, # 210

Here, complete with superfluity, are the opening paragraphs of a recent report in The Times:

Source: The Times (8 January, 2016), p. 17, and online

Patricia Leask […] “got in a few good scratches on his face” although she damaged her own nails in the process.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 205

Mo Juste comments: ‘As a keen supporter of Northampton Town Football Club, I’ve been following recent developments, but it’s hard to know when the administration petition will be heard according to this headline’ — when or even whether!

Link: Northampton Chronicle & Echo, ‘Administration petition for Northampton Town […]’

by on

You Cannot Be Serious, # 59

This product, with its tautologous description, spent much of this year in the remaindered display at the Rugby branch of Lidl:

decorative ornament

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 191

Dr Faustus has sent in this unfortunate BBC mangle, snapped from a smartphone. The report on the BBC webpage is phrased very differently, but a Google search suggests that the errors originated in a news feed issued by the BBC:

causalities for casualities; in on

Mangling Meaning, # 33

Is this ambiguity, redundancy or plain confusion in a promotional email from TomTom? Des Pond of Slough wonders: ‘Does “at once” mean immediately or simultaneously here? Is it “quickly” or “multiple” that is being rendered superfluous?’ 

quickly charge multiple devices at once

Not Washed or Cooked, # 236

Two mangles were included in a short section of a marketing email received from Routledge, the academic publishing house, on 11 May, 2015 (full browser version here):

Following the link to the main page for French Grammar and Usage brings you to the website’s main page on the text, which varies the information slightly, but still repeats both of these mangles:

Link: Routledge — Taylor & Francis Group, ‘French Grammar and Usage’

seaparately

Double-take, # 160

Tautological redundancy in The Times:

Link: The Times, ‘Female seamstress “smuggled hacksaw to US jailbreakers”’

female seamstress

Handritten, # 5

Spotted by Just Nick in Royal Leamington Spa:

Alcohol off liecense

Multimangle, # 12

This sentence from a report in the Telegraph quickly degenerates into gibberish:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Zinc not Vitamin C is best for fighting colds’

In addition to omitting ‘were‘, the writer has committed a tautology by leading into the quotation with both a that and a colon.

The quotation itself is rather odd: what on earth is ‘biblical’ intended to convey here, and why are medical researchers using such a non-scientific and contextually meaningless term (and in a scientific journal: the original source is cited as The Canadian Medical Association Journal)?

Although the studies carried out on children; concluded that: ; ‘no biblical reason’

Not Washed or Cooked, # 170

Dr Faustus found this typographical error in a survey:

The final sentence doesn’t read well either, with its cumbersome ‘You are able’ and its superfluous ‘different’.

subect; You are able to add up to 3 different degrees

Double-take, # 104

From a CSMA email:

This displays simultaneous tautology (‘plus more’) and redundancy (‘plus more’), as well as being meaningless (more what? Adults? Children? Something else entirely?).

plus more

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 145

It seems likely that this mangle, in the subheading of a report, arose from the writer’s later decision to insert an adjective:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Dying Art: Photographs of the Planet’s Lost and Fading Species’

As is so often the case, the adjective turns out to be superfluous.

An new exhibition

Double-take, # 101

The masculine pronoun in the final line here would be better replaced by the name —

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Andy Murray appears distracted as he surrenders Wimbledon title’

— but the key issue is superfluity: can one look upset other than visibly?*

* The writer seems enamoured of the phrase, which reappears — with other verbatim sections of this report — the following day in a follow-up piece.

looked visibly upset

Double-take, # 90

I’m not sure where he found this, but Des Pond of Slough feels that ink has been wasted here:

We’ve seen before that promoting food attracts tautologists.
delicious tasty

Double-take, # 78

Dr Faustus has found a paragraph with a much-mangled main clause:

Link: WalesOnline, ‘Under Milk Wood: 7 things to look for as film hits BBC Four’

the first first chance viewers from across the UK the first time it will have been broadcast

Double-take, # 77

Pop Spencer came upon this:

Link: Groupon, ‘Personalised Acrylic Photo Print in Choice of Sizes […]’

You can imagine the discussion.

‘Now, when you create the webpage, you need to put in eight points about the product — it’s got to be eight, OK?’
‘But there aren’t eight things on this list.’
‘Well, rejig one of them a bit and stick it in again. No-one’ll notice.’

I’m not convinced by ‘shiny appearance’ either: isn’t ‘shiny’ self-evidently linked to ‘appearance’?

duplication (Resistant to light and water/light and water resistant) & redundancy (Shiny appearance

Double-take, # 60

Link: Rugby Observer, 13 March 2014, p. 3

Des Pond of Slough found this appalling piece of journalism, but was so disgusted by the tautologous statement in the first paragraph — ‘near fatal’ (which should be hyphenated) = ‘fighting for his life’ — that he didn’t read any further, thus missing out on the wonderfully bathetic, completely contradictory and accidentally humorous juxtaposition relating to memory across the first two sentences/paragraphs, plus the typographical error in the third. I admit that I stopped reading at this point…

near fatal + fighting for life; amnesia + never forget; Dunhcurch