Singular or Plural? # 5

Wednesday's Times hedging its grammatical bets:

Mangling Meaning, # 11

Wise words, but a barely intelligible sentence from Mark Beatson, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development: 

Link: The Telegraph, '10 well paid jobs of the future'

The low-level punctuation can't necessarily be blamed on the speaker, though it still should have been corrected for publication; but the main winces are due to Mr Beatson's random shifting perspectives: what use are your good education and learning habits to your child's derailed career?

I also blenched at re-skill, but the OED advises that it's been around since at least 1937 (which doesn't make it any more attractive!), originally without a hyphen. It's not in Merriam-Webster at all, even though OED's earlier examples suggest it was coined in the USA.* 

* From the Chicago Tribune (1937); and in G. M. J. Veldkamp (in Western European Labor and the American Corporation, ed. A. Kamin (1970), vi. 437).

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 11

Possibly on sale at an outlet near you, this rather puzzling and very ungrammatical mug:

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 7

This is horribly familiar from newspapers' notices pages, but it features on gravestones too:

Mangling Meaning, # 10

This headline can't possibly mean what it says:

Link: Daily Telegraph, 'Millions of savers with £750bn'

Double-take, # 7

This would be (slightly) less depressing had this professional writer not, a few paragraphs earlier, referred to having studied in Glasgow for a Ph.D.:

Link: The Telegraph, Graeme Archer, 'being sat'

How many in a couple?

The Government's official website seems to have an uncommon perception of how many people can be involved in a marriage:

 Link: GOV.UK, Money and tax | Income Tax | Benefits & credits | Married Couple's Allowance

The writer might usefully consult Oxford Dictionaries (which, as previously noted, is not always 100% accurate, but is sound on this topic) to discover the correct construction and usage of comparative and superlative adjectives.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 6

The last time this mangle came up, it was a gym; this time it's the Guardian's Consumer Champions (and it won't be the last time they feature here):

Link: The Guardian, bought for brought

Singular or Plural? # 4

The writer has lost sight of the subject noun in this sentence's sub-clause, resulting in disagreement with the verb:

Link: Daily Telegraph, 'Head attacks "unreliable" university background checks'

Perhaps 'the imposition' should have been omitted entirely, since it's superfluous.

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 56

Twice it's wrong, and then suddenly it's right ― so why not correct the earlier ones?

Link: Google Books. Barbara Brink, Entangled

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 10

Dr Faustus, recently returned to the UK, has been noting problems with literacy in Reading (as in Berkshire, not reading as in books), where nominations are currently being solicited for the Reading Retail Awards, in categories such as My Favourite Coffee Shop:

The above is a detail of a poster, but research shows that superfluous apostrophes appear in several places on the Awards website, such as the homepage and the Award Categories page, where it's unclear how many judges are evaluating the entrants. There's also an excess of exclamation marks…

Dr Faustus then noticed another poster, right next to the Reading Retail Awards one:

Presumably there weren't enough apostrophes left after the Awards people finished…

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 5

Today's offering, taken from an email from the Telegraph about an IT glitch in its subscriber routine, contains a range of issues relating to clarity of expression, mainly connected to the failure to have the pronouns agree in number with the nouns to which they supposedly relate. Thus both the Technical Team and the subscribers are represented by the plural 'they', making it seem that it is the subscribers, not the technicians, who are running the tests. Then there's the fact that the subscribers, being referred to as 'that' rather than 'who', seem to have been stripped of humanity.

However, the star mangle occurs in the final line: