Apostrophe catastrophe, # 67

Spotted by Des Pond of Slough, this advertisement for The Old Plough, Braunston, provides a variety pack of apostrophe catastrophes:

Source: The Village Emporium, Borders edition, September/October 2014, p. 30

You will search in vain for a note connected to the asterisk…
fish n chips; Pensioners portion; hand cut chips; pie’s and pudding’s

Double-take, # 120

Submitted by John Holloway (and a little later by Kieron Hayes), this is one of many questionnaires doing the rounds online, and here appears with the mangled Facebook wrapper:

As John points out, ‘Intelligence quotas are not percentages — and as for “your’s”!’
IQ 187%; your’s

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 156

Via Dr Faustus. I didn’t ask where he found it, but it’s from a mock GCSE paper:

what does the Kalahari expedition offers

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 66

Here, on Mangling English’s birthday, a double-whammy apostrophe catastrophe —

Source: The Rugby Register, North & Villages edition, December 2014, p. 14, and online.
Cf. South and Central edition, p. 29, and online

— is supported by a failure to hyphenate ‘lead-up’ and some question-mark overkill. Pictured is the face of the mangle-spotter on spotting the mangles.

tip‘s; lead up; ???

Right word, wrong form, # 4

This mangle can be found on an Australian video available on Facebook:

Link: Facebook, Sea FM Hobart, ‘Depressed goat […]’

Mangle aside, the film tells a heart-warming story; it’s worth watching if you like goats, donkeys, animals-in-general, stories-with-happy-endings or some combination of the above.

laid for lay

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 155

This mangle was submitted some time ago by Dr Faustus:

Link: Official London Theatre, ‘Hampstead Theatre streams Drawing the Line’

Variations on the theme of streaming occur correctly on ten occasions in the report; but it needed a final proofread before posting.

steaming for streaming

Double-take, # 119

This product-name mangle dates back to the end of July, so I imagine it’s too late to snaffle the bargain:

Source: Rugby Observer, 31 July 2014, p. 44, and online

I initially assumed that the mangle had arisen because the drink had ceased to be made and long been forgotten, but it turns out that Babycham celebrated sixty years of manufacture last year. If you want to know what a Baby cham (or ‘baby cham’) glass looks like, there’s a picture in the BBC report on the anniversary.

baby cham

Not Washed or Cooked, # 184

This mangle comes from a blog entry on a website whose title seems to be missing a necessary apostrophe:

Link: The Creators Project [sic], ‘24-Hour Online Cat TV […]’

It’s not clear whether this is a typographical error or a mondegreen. Either way, the writer has not run the text through a spell-checker or consulted a dictionary.

Admist for amidst; Creators Project

Multimangle, # 12

This sentence from a report in the Telegraph quickly degenerates into gibberish:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Zinc not Vitamin C is best for fighting colds’

In addition to omitting ‘were‘, the writer has committed a tautology by leading into the quotation with both a that and a colon.

The quotation itself is rather odd: what on earth is ‘biblical’ intended to convey here, and why are medical researchers using such a non-scientific and contextually meaningless term (and in a scientific journal: the original source is cited as The Canadian Medical Association Journal)?

Although the studies carried out on children; concluded that: ; ‘no biblical reason’

Double-take, # 118

Spotted in the Kingsthorpe, Northamptonshire, area by Mo Juste: 

Mo Juste comments: ‘Unfortunately it doesn’t have a company name, but obviously someone’s paid a fair bit of money to have it done.’ (One would hope not, given the mixture of font faces: some of the ls have serifs, but others don’t.) Mo even checked online in case someone had set up a company called Ulimited. The lack of company name or contact details does seem to be a bit of a problem if the plan is to persuade people to sign up; while ‘5Giga data’ seems to be a form of mondegreen.

Ulimited calls. Ulimited text.5Giga data

Not Washed or Cooked, # 183

Another from Dr Faustus, this seems include all necessary details:

World Gold Counsil

Double-take, # 117

This, the opening paragraph of a BBC report from last month, comes via Dr Faustus:

Source: BBC News for smartphone; and online: BBC News, ‘Terror suspect Abu Rumaysah leaves UK despite ban’

being banned him