Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 75

Des Pond of Slough sends this:

Link: BBC News, Eyewitness

and comments: ‘I could be a Social Affairs Correspondent. Hang on, that’s not a job title: he’s a Social affairs correspondent. Friendly, adulterous and communicative, in that order?’

It’s a fair point. Capitalization seems to be becoming random, yet the dozen or so grammar sites I’ve checked this morning agree that a job title relating to a specific person and role, following the person’s name and identifying the capacity is which that person is operating in the immediate circumstances (e.g., John Cross, Features Editor), should be capitalized, whereas the term used to describe a working role more broadly (John Cross is a features editor or John Cross is the features editor) should not.

It makes sense: this is, after all, related to the issue of common and proper nouns. In the case of the fictitious John Cross, the compound noun in John Cross is the features editor is a generic descriptor of a role, and thus a common noun; while the construction John Cross, Features Editor presents Features Editor as a formal job title and a proper noun.

In today’s example, Michael Buchanan is writing not in his private capacity, but specifically in his role as Social Affairs Correspondent for BBC News, and so should use capitals. If the byline offered a descriptor instead of a formal job title (Michael Buchanan is a/the social affairs correspondent for BBC News), capitals would not be appropriate.

This is something that a spell-checker cannot correct…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 49

Here’s an old friend:

Link: The Surrealists, ‘Recieves grace [sic] by Yves Tanguy’

So recieves appears for receives, while the punctuation needs work: a comma is needed before by. 

There’s another issue here which we’ll come back to sometime soon: when did titles stop being presented as titles and start being treated as plain phrases or sentences? (The missing comma above accentuates the issue in this case.) You don’t expect to see book conventions (generally titles italicized for long/big works, or placed in quotation marks for smaller ones) followed everywhere, but titles used to have capital letters on the key words (mainly, but not exclusively, nouns and verbs) — that’s how you know they are titles and which words are in the title. The practice seems to be dying out, even including in some books and academic publications; and (unsurprisingly) the result is that it is frequently difficult to distinguish titles from surrounding text…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 15

Spotted on an advertising hoarding, this is a variant of the issue addressed in the first Apostrophe catastrophe:

The opening quotation mark should, of course, be an apostrophe, since it’s representing a missing letter within the contraction. Perhaps that should have warned filmgoers what to expect…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 14

Two recent examples of a common error:

 Link: The Telegraph, ‘What next for savings rates?’

 

 Link: BBC News, ‘Herne Hill properties flooded […]’

There are further punctuation issues (notably, but not exclusively, in the second extract), but the key point here is that both sentences lack the apostrophes required in ordinary possessive constructions. The former, discussing ‘the difference of thousands of pounds’, should be thousands of pounds’ difference; and the latter should transmit ‘the worth of thousands [of pounds]’ as thousands’ worth of products.

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 13

nPower’s second appearance within weeks (the first was also connected with reading meters) contains something that shouldn’t have made it to the published page, and didn’t go through a spell-checker:

Source: nPower personalized customer webpage

Perhaps not surprising considering the odd capitalization of the company’s name…

Problem punctuation, # 5

A completely random comma from the opening sentence of a recent Telegraph article:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘How welfare reform boosted property profits’

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 17

This example of a misunderstood word, which occurs in various places, is from the online catalogue of The Original Sofa Co:

 Link: Original Sofa Co.,‘The Grenville’

— unless it’s a subtle characterization of the British electorate as a flock of chickens…

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 79

The word order in the final paragraph below is suffering from inversion:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Mortgage rates […]’

I suppose it’s possible that buying only 41% might be cheaper than renting, but the Forbes article online clarifies matters: ‘At 3.9% […] buying is 41% cheaper than renting nationally.’*

The Telegraph’s headline, ‘Mortgage rates only need rise “0.69pc” to make renting cheaper’, is not best phrased, since it confuses the adjective only with the adverb only. The context shows that this only relates to the sum and thus should be placed next to it, not by the verb.

* It’s not apparent why the British media now tends to shun the traditional percentage sign in favour of the abbreviation pc.

 

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 16

This, one of several bullet points beneath a very long headline in the online Mail (11 January, 2013), has puzzled me for a while:

Link: MailOnline, ‘Solicitors “ran immigration scam […]”’

Quite apart from the fact that the formulation makes it sound as if the writer (or possibly the gang) is uncertain of the meaning of brides and husbands, the sentence is illogical since the two aren’t equivalent: brides or bridegrooms or wives or husbands, but not brides or husbands.

The fashion for newspapers to install paywalls is spreading fast, so I fear that mangles from the media may soon become rare.

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 15

Perhaps the large number of words here that correctly contain double e led to this rather unfortunate suggestion in a to-do list left on a whiteboard:

Cheeking people if you need them is probably not a good idea. Checking who you need is wise though.

Note: do wipe boards when you’ve finished with them … or risk being mangled (and unpopular with the room supervisors)!

Double-take, # 12

Des Pond of Slough was slightly puzzled by content in an email from the Open University:

He remarks: ‘I would assume that “modern advertising” was still using 13th- to 17th-century techniques, or have I fallen through a temporal anomaly?’

It’s also worth pointing out that the phrase ‘the 13th to 17th century’ needs another direct article, might benefit from pluralizing its noun (‘the 13th to the 17th centuries’), and would seem more elegant, and thus more professional, without the unnecessary abbreviations (thus: ‘the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries’), which might have resulted in fewer errors in the first place.

Problem punctuation, # 4

Gary Hazell contributes this, from a tee shirt sold by the Pilgrim Bandits, a charity founded by Special Forces veterans:

The quotation comes from James Elroy Flecker’s ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’:

THE MASTER OF THE CARAVAN:
But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes,
You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?

THE PILGRIMS:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further […] 

Quoted from the version on Ruth’s Jordan Jubilee: The Country and the People of Jordan

Clearly someone has tried hard to adapt this for comprehensible use without the need to identify the dramatis personae and thus has inserted (some) speech marks. However, something seems to have gone very wrong with this process, while changes to the punctuation (notably the removal of both the question mark and the comma preceding ‘master’) and capitalization cause some confusion. The alterations to ‘“You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?”’ suggest the line is not fully understood.

It might have been better to quote the Pilgrims’ words alone (and remove the ‘master’), since these both make the Pilgrim Bandits’ point and make perfect sense without the Caravan Master’s question.