Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 18

So many mangles, so little time… This is a classic:

Link: Fooyoh Entertainment, 'Sahara Dessert'

You Cannot Be Serious, # 4

It's not the hideous grammatical error that secures this clipping its place in You Cannot Be Serious, but the unfortunate extraneous preposition :

Source: Rugby Observer (print), 10 January 2013, p. 3;  online

You Cannot Be Serious, # 3

From the archives, this one goes well beyond the basics of spellchecking and proofreading, and into the land of fantasy newspaper caption creation — unless Mr Lang is being cast as a descendant of Sweeney Todd… It's a clipping I've cherished for many years; sadly, I forgot to date it (pre-mainstream internet, though), but I think it was published in the early 1990s:

 Source: Daily Telegraph (date unlogged)

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 17

Not least because of the rather strange link titles, I spent some time wondering whether this mangle was deliberate, perhaps an attempt to communicate an ironic or cynical message.

In the end, I decided that I was overthinking it: it's just an unchecked typographical error. (Note that it's also crept into the URL, which tends to offer a bigger challenge in terms of correcting errors subsequently.)

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/tag/paradigm-shit/

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 16

Like eNotes.com (see You Cannot Be Serious, # 2), StudyMode.com (motto: 'Inspiring Better Grades') offers essays to students, although the site explicitly decries plagiarism:

Let’s be clear: submitting another person's work as your own is plagiarism, and we’re against it. While you may legitimately cite these works and use them as reference material and thought-starters to your heart’s content, please do not turn in articles from this website as your own.

Link: StudyMode.com disclaimer

It's a bit of a conflict of interest, then, that the site carries sponsored advertising for tailored essays and reports:

Link: StudyMode.com disclaimer

StudyMode also has a premium service, with prices ranging from 29.95USD per month to 89.95USD for a six-month subscription,* which allows access to full-length essays.

In case you thought I'd forgotten the mangling, here's a small selection of examples, focussed on, but not confined to, a mangle we've encountered before and will certainly meet again:

Link: StudyMode.com, 'Functions of Government in Pubic Policy'

Link: StudyMode.com, 'Classification of Pubic and Private Education'

Link: StudyMode.com, 'Comparison of Stress Level…'

* Source: Sarah Glazer, 'Plagiarism and Cheating', CQ Researcher, 23 (4 January, 2013), 1-28. Consulted online, 8 January 2013.

Not Washed or Cooked, # 4

This is an example of the kind of typographical error I particularly despise, not simply because it's sloppy and avoidable, but because it turns tragedy into farce:

 Link: Daily Telegraph, 'shotting debt'

The word 'shotting' does, in fact, exist: the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'The action of weighting with shot; esp. in Angling, the weighting of the line with shot', though it's not in common usage, and the spellcheckers in Word, WordPerfect and Blogger have all highlighted it as unknown. Surely someone at the DT should have spotted it…

 

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 2

My cousin had this for Christmas:

Found it yet? Here's the detail enlarged:

They also do this one:

King of the kitchen, but not of the grammar…

You Cannot Be Serious, # 2

Below a 'college freshman' (I think this means a first-year student at a North American high school, college of further education, or university) is requesting 'help' — actually to have a whole report or essay written for him (or her: 'freshman' seems to cover all gender options) — from eNotes.com, 'an educational resource used by millions of teachers and students', offering 'study guides, lesson plans, quizzes with a vibrant community of knowledgeable teachers and students to help you with almost any subject'… for a monthly or annual fee.

The freshman's homework (sampled below) was supplied by someone describing him/herself as a 'Teacher Graduate School Honors'. Wikipedia confirms this means someone doing (or perhaps having completed) an advanced degree.

Prepare to spit your coffee over your keyboard:

 Link: eNotes, 'Santan's speeches'

You Cannot Be Serious, # 1

The post-festive period can be quite gloomy for many, so I'm going for maximum amusement today.

This is one of a small, but cherished, collection that I look at from time to time and think cannot possibly be genuine errors, so it starts a new thread called, with apologies to John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious.

The question is the main point, but the response is worth reading too… 

 Link: Answers Corporation, 'cane, abel and Stan'

Not Washed or Cooked, # 3

Sticking with the 'artifical' thread, here are some examples of international science weekly New Scientist not spellchecking or proofreading its article titles, a tradition stretching over two decades:

  Link: New Scientist, 'Artifical mother of pearl…'

 Link: New Scientist, 'Artifical blood deaths…'

 Link: New Scientist, 'Babies born to artifical "cells"'

Link: New Scientist, 'Artifical intelligence…'

Not Washed or Cooked, # 2

I imagine I'm not the only one back at work today, so it'll be back to short and reprehensible for the next few entries.

This one's an example from a North American site, so I shall employ the appropriate American-English term for the severity of the mangle. This is a humdinger:

 Link: 'Moblie Artifical Pancreas'

It's undoubtedly a good cause, but I'd think twice (at least) about donating, and it seems possible that people with money might also decide to donate elsewhere: after all, if you can't, don't or won't make the effort to be accurate when you're trying to part punters from their cash, why would you be any more precise in creating the technology? 

I can't decide whether I'm more astonished that the errors haven't been noticed or that 'pancreas' is correct…

'Most trusted' does not necessarily equal correct

Let's start the year with a hideous mangle from a highly reputable international publisher: 

Link: Oxford Dictionaries, 'Better Writing … Inverted Commas'

It's hard to understand how this error could have occurred at all, and examples of usage further down the page use real double quotation marks.

The failure to check the content adequately is especially reprehensible given the site's blazoned identifier as 'The world's most trusted dictionaries', and this mangle's location in a section on 'Better writing'…