Multimangle, # 47

Dr Faustus reports a sticky space bar at Shakespeare’s Globe (the first instance now corrected on the webpage, although the space seems to have been lifted from the later section on The White Devil, ‘Webster’stragedy’) in a synopsis that also uses revenge in a less than meaningful manner:

Link: Shakespeare’s Globe, ‘Read Not Dead’

Cervantes’influence, andraucously, anepisode, withthe, revenge for avenge

Problem punctuation, # 13

Syntactical confusion at Shakespeare’s Globe:

Guess what I got you for your birthday?

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 109

In the second paragraph of this submission from Dr Faustus, the quotation marks used to distinguish the play’s title have collided problematically with a possessive apostrophe. The preposition used (twice) with ‘divorce’ in the first paragraph seems ill-chosen too:

Link: TimeOut, ‘Controversial author Rachel Cusk reshapes Euripides’s “Medea” in her own image’

‘Medea’s; divorce with

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 93

Foxed by a homophone? Via Dr Faustus:

Link: TimeOut London, review of Our Country’s Good

course for coarse

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 100

This mangle appeared in a marketing email sent to Dr Faustus by the Donmar Theatre. The full poster can presently be found online:

chair’s for chairs

Double-take, # 161

Today’s mangle predates this blog, and was blogged elsewhere, but it follows on nicely from yesterday’s and it seems appropriate to bring it into the Mangling English fold — and it is a favourite of mine:

The Rugby Review (5 November 2009)

black female actress

Double-take, # 140

Dr the Homie Smith says of this mangle: ‘I suppose if you pronounce the name of the play with a really posh accent, it might be spelled this way.’

Link: Manchestertheatres.com, Lowry Theatre listings

King Leah

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 169

From the inbox of Dr Faustus, who comments: ‘I’m pretty sure Imelda Staunton would be horrified to see her name mangled thus!’ Indeed, it is a major mangle to inflict on a famous actress. Perhaps her next Ethel Merman revival role should be Call Me Madam…

To be fair, LondonTheatreDirect.com have managed to spell the name correctly online.
Stanton for Staunton

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 155

This mangle was submitted some time ago by Dr Faustus:

Link: Official London Theatre, ‘Hampstead Theatre streams Drawing the Line’

Variations on the theme of streaming occur correctly on ten occasions in the report; but it needed a final proofread before posting.

steaming for streaming

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 152

This mangle was spotted by Dr Faustus on his tablet:

Dr Faustus comments: ‘I am reminded of Shakespeare in Love where Will (Joseph Fiennes) says to Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) that he is still owed for “One Gentleman of Verona”!’

The error reappeared (this time courtesy of the smartphone of Dr Faustus) on a listing from the Arts Centre at Warwick University

This is not our first presentation of such mindless reproduction of mangles, and a Google search (which tried hard to correct the error) shows this one, too, being disseminated faithfully:

Not Washed or Cooked, # 166

Des Pond of Slough found today’s mangle on this year’s Heritage Open Days webpages. Presumably, it exactly reproduces material supplied by the venue, which is odd since this is a word much used in the theatre:

Link: Heritage Open Days, Royal and Derngate Theatres

rehersal

Adjectival Confusion, # 2

The homepage of Blue Mango Creative HQ has been under construction for some months to my knowledge, and refers to the construction work rather oddly:

Link: Blue Mango Creative HQ

I’m sure Roland Barthes, that commentator on the strangeness of washing powders’ ability to clean ‘deeply’, would have had something to say about the deployment of ‘heavy’ in this context.

heavy updating

Not Washed or Cooked, # 150

The text with this link, found on Facebook a few days ago, mangles the king’s name:

Source: link breadcrumb to The Guardian review

The review’s sub-heading (now) spells the name correctly, but a Google search shows that it was the origin of the misspelling.

Note: if you’re wondering about immersive, read Matt Petronzio’s explanation.

Malcom

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 130

Another oddity from the inbox of Dr Faustus, who wanders [sic]: ‘Is a last night party male?!’
male party? wonders for wanders

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 35

Dr Faustus offers this mangle, in which an apostrophe catastrophe is accompanied by a shift in focus that results in a numerical disconnect between the subject noun and its pronoun in the final sentence:

Link: Flavorwire, ‘Required Reading: Modern Political Memoirs’, 23 August, 2010

it’s for its; the letters … it

Not Washed or Cooked, # 123

Following on from yesterday’s introduction to DBA theatre [sic] by Just Liam, today’s mangles come from a page on the company’s ‘School Enrichment Programme’, where the ‘Secondary Enrichment Programme’ offers

These include:

Link: DBA theatre | School Enrichment Programme | School Enrichment Programme

Quite apart from the patchy punctuation and inconsistent presentation of possessives, a theatre company that cannot spell Artaud and Stanislavsky (or Stanislavski) does not inspire confidence.

Another page — The ‘SEN Enrichment Programme’ — cuts off the final sentence (‘We also offer workshops for days suc’) with a badly-positioned slide show.

It doesn’t take long to spellcheck, proofread and polish, but no-one’s done any of it here.

Artoud, Boals; Stanisklavsky; punctuation; apostrophe

Not Washed or Cooked, # 123

This is the first of a two-part mangle submitted by Just Liam and taken from the webpages of DBA (‘dream.believe.achieve’) theatre. Today’s clip comes from the information page of the theatre’s Owner and Creative Director, who ‘has been offered a place at Warwick University to complete a Masters in Drama and Theatre Education’:

Link: DBA theatre | Meet the Team | Olivia Medlock, Owner and Creative Director

experiance; colleauge

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 31

Dr Faustus continues in his quest to root out apostrophe catastrophes. Today’s comes from a review published in The Oxford Student:

Link: The Oxford Student, ‘Breathing Corpses has no skeletons in the closet […]’

It transpires that it’s occurs frequently in the review, but in the other six examples, the apostrophe is correctly inserted. There’s also another its, but that one is correct. These, therefore, seem to be an aberration…

its for it’s: its because its not

You Cannot Be Serious, # 21

This might have been improved by the application of better punctuation, but the phrasing still seems very ugly, and all the more so given the juxtaposition with O’Toole’s elegant diction:

Link: The Guardian, ‘Peter O’Toole, star of Lawrence of Arabia [sic], dies aged 81’

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 23

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:

Link: University of Warwick, School of Life Sciences, ‘LF301 – Bacteria: Genes to Behaviour’

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:*

Link: Google search on ‘“principle aims of” module university’

You would also think that a librarian would know the difference:

Link: University of Texas Digital Repository, Dorothy Ledbetter Hall, ‘Balancing Accountability and Ethics: A Case Study of An Elementary School Principle’

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:

Link: University of Texas Digital Repository, Dorothy Ledbetter Hall, ‘Balancing Accountability and Ethics: A Case Study of An Elementary School Principle’ (pdf dissertation)

It isn’t just universities. This head teacher, for instance, has hedged his bets:

Link: LinkedIn, Matt Brandl (Morton Middle school principle)

The problem is found in other professional contexts too. Headline writers at the Vancouver Sun should surely know better:

Link: Vancouver Sun, ‘Heather Ogden […] principle dancer […]’

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:

Link: Gala Entertainment Management, ‘Nicole, Dancer, aerialist’

Link: MSA (McDonald/Selznick Associates), ‘Brittanie Brant’

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:

Link: Essence of Fire

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:

 Link: SUNY Fredonia, Faculty at School of Music, biography of Shinobu Takagi

Finally, the University of East Anglia offers another singer, together with a nasty grammatical slip:**

Link: University of East Anglia, School of Music, biography of Hannah Francis

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.