Apostrophe catastrophe, # 5

Spotted in the Rugby branch of The Range this morning:

iPod's, but iPhones? Why not iPod's and iPhone's? Or even iPods and iPhones? At least be consistent!

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 41

The Daily Telegraph webpage shows a different version of this Android posting from Wednesday:

It's not clear whether this is a typographical error or whether the term was unfamiliar to the writer; but the linked blogpost seems (the posted is dated, but not timestamped) to have spelt it correctly from the outset…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 40

Link: Amazon.co.uk, Ealing Studios Collection, Vol. 1

Oh dear: accuracy levels down to 50%…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 39

Bob Godiva has sent in this little gem, from the back of Browns* in Coventry:

* Sic, before anyone says anything! Whatever the Coventry Telegraph might write in its headline and story (and, indeed, might justifiably suppose to be correct), the picture of the bar it has published shows no apostrophe.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 38

Although I was a dab hand at calligraphy in the days before computers, I learnt early that I wasn't going to be someone who could draw. Most of the time I don't think about it; but I do wish I could do an illustration for today's mangle:

 Link: Robin Allen, If You Can't Stand the Heat (on Google Books)

The same error appears a couple more times in the book, but someone appears to have pointed it out to the author who, in the sequel, uses the term awning. Pity no-one noticed before it was published…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 37

After a couple of days off, one of the best/worst mangles we've had, supplied by . For reasons that will become obvious, I've made it as anonymous as I can without losing the point of it.

As some readers are aware, there have been occasional discussions on Facebook about whether any of this ― spelling correctly, checking for errors, using the right word ― matters at all, or even whether it should matter. As I've said before, and will doubtless say again, one thing that particularly incenses me is when someone's failure to think, check and/or proofread results in a piece of text that is unintentionally and inappropriately humorous. This provokes amusement in the reader, who has been manoeuvred into involuntarily laughing at others' woe.

It's heinous when the text has been published by someone who is paid for producing it, whether this be a professional writer responsible for creating the content, or an inputter or typist, whose job is to transmit others' words.

So, anyone who thinks it doesn't matter, read this:

Imagine the feelings of the people who paid for the privilege of having this in memoriam notice unforgivably mangled by a newspaper-office employee who couldn't be bothered to check it properly.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 4

This is the footer from the homepage of the English version of 'the official website of the Parc Asterix':*

Link: Parc Asterix, English

I wish there'd been a character called Grammatix to evoke at this moment!

* Shouldn't that be Astérix? If you're a fan, have a look round the site; I don't know if there are more errors, but there's some interesting content, including pages on translations of the stories, though not enough have their own pages (Hebrew, Latin, Greek variants, Creole variants, and Picard do) if it's true that the books have been translated into more than 107 languages and dialects― more examples, please!

Double-take, # 3

The internet and media are excited by advances that offer 3D and even 4D printing methods, but the final option in this survey question suggests that Argos is well ahead of the technological companies:

'To […] touch the product'? Really?

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 36

In amongst the mix-and-match of media I graze on, I used to buy and read The Times and The Sunday Times fairly often, until they started charging for the online versions, and I gave them up as a matter of principle.

However, as newspapers sometimes feature in the blog, I'd been wondering whether I should give the Times family the option to be included to maintain the balance; so I started to investigate the options. They were not impressive.

Bad

This is from the page where Times Newspapers Ltd sets out its wares:

 

 Link: Times Newspapers Ltd, subscriptions

Forty-three words, one unchecked typographical error and one misplaced comma: not a good score.

Badder

A read through yesterday's Sunday Times shows that misplaced commas are popular; perhaps it's a house style. There's an absent comma that the editor of the Letters page should certainly have inserted to prevent inappropriate hilarity arising when reading a sad missive on a serious topic. (In the interests of taste, I haven't harvested it or included it here.) It made me wonder, not for the first time, what exactly editors do these days. Even Wikipedia (citing the work of Alexander Mamishev and Sean Williams) accurately states that 

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete work.

Key aspects are correctness and accuracy, which are frequently missing from the news media.

Baddest*

Yesterday's Sunday Times also published three corrections (reproduced here from p. 28 of the physical newspaper; the various errors had not made me rush to enter my credit card details to secure digital access…):

All three are details that could, and definitely should, have been verified before publication.

Overall, not very impressive, and I've read only the main newspaper so far. Going back to the products page, it's not even clear whether the delivered newspapers are put through the letterbox; the Sunday Times is now so huge that it seems scarcely possible. As we've seen, the weekly and Sunday papers are taken to 'you door', but the Times Literary Supplement, although much thinner than its Sunday relative, doesn't make it that far:**

Soggy supplement, anyone?

*Bad, usually spelt badde, badder and baddest were the medieval precursors of the modern bad, worse and worst. (See that great resource, the Middle English Dictionary, hosted by the University of Michigan, under badde.)

** It is, though, much more professional in its use of punctuation.

You Cannot Be Serious, # 14

This is a screenprint of a video thumbnail preview of an online ITN News story from early last month. Grammatically, the caption is decidedly imprecise:  

 Link: ITN News, 'naked bullfighting protest'

The syntax used makes it appear that the protest is against naked bullfighting, a pastime that rather makes the mind boggle.* A simple alteration to the word order ― Naked protest against bullfighting ― would resolve this and still let ITN position the word naked prominently.

However, naked is a problem here, since the protester at the front is clearly not naked. Thus there's inaccuracy as well as imprecision in the caption. Further investigation reveals that the protesters, animal rights supporters in Mexico, never intended to remove their underwear…

* Mindboggling or not, it is a fact that some people do take all their clothes off to do bullfighting. Famously, or perhaps notoriously, there's some nude bullfighting in the Spanish film Jamón Jamón (1992), although apparently the scene takes place at night, so it's impossible to tell. If you're desperate, YouTube has some video footage of an almost naked bloke (he's wearing trainers and socks) trying simultanously to avoid being knocked down by a bull (he fails) and to hide his bits behind a red cape.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 1

A pet peeve:

Link: Vitality Gym & Health Club, 'bought onto'

It's a puzzle how anyone can mix up bought (from buy) with brought (from bring), but it's a surprisingly widespread error. (I'm not sure whether there's a variant that has brought for bought.) If it occured only in writing, it could be seen as an uncorrected typographical slip; but it often occurs in speech too, so it seems that those who make the mistake do so in the belief that they are using the correct word.

The error is an example of acyrologia, which the excellent website Silva Rhetoricæ (The Forest of Rhetoric) defines as

An incorrect use of words, especially the use of words that sound alike but are far in meaning from the speaker's intentions.

There is an English version of the term: acyrology. The OED, noting that the word is rarely used after the seventeenth century, defines it simply as

Incorrect use of language.

Now there's a word that deserves to be brought — or perhaps bought — back into regular usage.

You Cannot Be Serious, # 13

Quite apart from the rather stilted phrasing of questions 2 and 3 in this software exit survey, no-one bothered checking the option names:

Link: Copernic Uninstall Survey