Not Washed or Cooked, # 6

Someone must have been paid to take the time to scan this in, run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, save the file, and upload the result: 

Link: HRVH Historical Newspapers, Southeastern New York Library Resources Council

Why, though? Never mind 'not 100% accurate': what possible use is the result to anyone?

With all the material there must be to archive, surely it's better just scan the original and upload it. This works:

Link: HRVH Historical Newspapers, Southeastern New York Library Resources Council, 2

 

Now Try It In English, # 2

This was quoted in a Daily Telegraph report that was rather generously supplied with mangles:

Link: The Telegraph, 'we would crime it'

A trawl round the internet shows that, so far at least, this mangle seems not to be widespread, though it's not unique —

Link: Yahoo, 'Crime Referrance Number'

— and it may, of  course, be standard police jargon, as this clip from a PoliceUK.com forum suggests:

 Link: PoliceUK.com, 'crime it'

The slogan 'Stamp Out Crime' was once common. How about 'Stamp Out "Crime" As A Verb'?

Not Washed or Cooked, # 5

It's fair to say that spellchecking isn't possible in this situation, and it's too late for proofreading at this stage. This photograph of a friend-of-a-friend's arm has been going round the internet for a while:

It was his first tattoo, and may well be his last; if not, I recommend a move to graphics-only.

Now Try It In English, # 1

This is rather eye-watering:

Link: The Telegraph, 'poor families are likely to be obese'

 

The speaker is Anna Soubry, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health, who has previously worked in journalism and law.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 25

A quick return today to a familiar and frequent mangle: 

Link: The Pubic Face of Wilkie Collins

The copyright on the webpage is 1997-2005. You'd have thought someone would have mentioned the error by now; but then there's no obvious way to contact the author…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 24

Another of my cousin's Christmas presents was a jolly little volume called The Quotations of Oscar Wilde, The Drawings of Simon Drew (2004), which included this typographical error:

At less than 50 pages, and mainly illustrations, it can't have been much effort to proofread the book properly.

You Cannot Be Serious, # 5

Today, a contribution from an alert Manglereader:

Link: BBC News, 18 January 2013, 'C&W buses disrupted by snow'

It's not apparent whether this was mangled by the representative from the NUT (that's the UK's National Union of Teachers, for the benefit of international readers) or the anonymous journalist. Both of them should have realized that 'behold' here was gibberish.*

 

Behove (or behoove, which US-English prefers, while UK-English uses either) is rather rare these days, but both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary include it as viable and in current usage.

* Given that one represents schoolteachers and the other writes for a living, both should also have known that the construction 'many official warnings' needs a plural verb form (more on verbal agreement soon), and that the 'not just' part of the not only but also formula should appear before 'to make a judgement' to make good sense.  However, since it's likely that the comments were made over the telephone, and possibly at short notice, these can't fairly be counted as full-blooded mangles.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 23

Today's mangles come from four different sources, all of which presumably want to be taken seriously, but all of which failed to check before publication whether their work contained unfortunate slips of the fingers.

Link: North Fork Merchant Herald, 'pubic face'

Link: Dartmouth College Library, 'pubic face'

Link: C&O Canal Trust, 'pubic face'

Link: Young, On Female Body Experience (New York: OUP, 2005), 'pubic face'

C&O might be forgiven, though even a non-profit organization should bother to proofread to make sure it's displaying itself as well as possible. The journalist should certainly know better, but it's not a rare error in the media. Dartmouth College Library is displaying a pretty dire 'pubic face' for this project; but the instance in Isis Marion Young's book takes the prize here: various educated persons, such as the publisher's reader(s) and maybe even an editor, will have read the work in its journey from proposal to publication and should have picked this one up. Perhaps they all thought Young was making some kind of obscure pun and didn't like to ask…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 22

Of course the pubic typo — of which more in due course: it's a popular one — can work both ways:

Link: Right Diagnosis, 'Public lice'

I'd rather not have had an opportunity to associate M&S with infestation… but apparently the advertising keeps the site free, and Right Diagnosis (RD) may be able to afford a proofreader one day. 

 

Right Diagnosis, in case you're wondering, is 'one of the world's leading providers of online medical health information'. That's what its About Us page says and it should know:

Link: Right Diagnosis, 'About us'

It's good to know consumers and health professionals have somewhere they can find information about public lice, whatever they are… except, as the astute will have spotted, it actually doesn't say that at all. It seems to be referring to a different website altogether: WrongDiagnosis.com.

So what happens when you type 'www.wrongdiagnosis.com' into an address bar and hit the return key?

You arrive here:

 Link: Better Medicine

It's beyond me! I think it may be beyond them too…

 

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 21

The world of university education may be stranger than you imagined. Below is a selection of courses and departments.

A course in the University of North Carolina Wilmington's brochure (corrected in the 2012-13 catalogue):

 Link: UNCW, CRM460, 'Crime & Pubic Policy' 

Wright State University is offering this course in 2012-13:

Link: Wright State, 'Pubic Policy Analysis'

The University of Massachusetts was offering comparative courses in 2011:

 Link: University of Massachusetts, 'Comparative Pubic Policy'

No-one seems to have checked this entry on Academia.edu for a department at Ashford University. Interesting combination though:

 Link: Ashford, 'Pubic Policy, Homeland Security' 

Another unusual academic department:

Link: Carnegie Mellon, 'Pubic Policy & Management'

 
It's a research area that turns out to be popular internationally:

Link: Fudan, 'Social Development & Pubic Policy'

Presumably this is the kind of thing you can go for when you've done the preliminary courses:

Link: Chicago/Minglebox, 'Master of Pubic Policy' 

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 20

Warwick University's student newspaper The Boar misplaced its spellchecker some time ago, and it still seems to be missing:

 Link: The Boar, 'accomdation'

 

The same error features in the printed version, which adds further information about the author.

 The Boar, 35:6 (9 January 2012), p. 7.

 
I'm not sure what a Comment Editor does, but it seems not to involve editing in the sense of checking or proofreading…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 19

Continuing on from yesterday's new thread, this doesn't sound very appetizing; fortunately it's not a cookbook:

Link: South Asia Books, 'Salt Dessert'

The word is spelt correctly on the cover of the image used by the outlet, and twice in the blurb, so there's no excuse…