Multimangle, # 21

The third and final day of mangles spotted by Vice-Commodore Pugwash at the National Defence Academy, Shrivenham. At least the relentless capitalization has been dropped, presumably because this is information rather than instruction:

Monday’s for Mondays; Friday’s for Fridays

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 188

A pair of instructions from the walls of the National Defence Academy, Shrivenham, submitted by Vice-Commodore Pugwash:

faulty for faulty; [any for a]; [syntax]; comma for full stop

Double-take, # 162

Vice-Commodore Pugwash spotted this in the Officers’ Mess at the National Defence Academy, Shrivenham:

will incur costs of which will be added; colon

Multimangle, # 20

This extract (subsequently corrected) offers a selection of typographical errors:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Driving test upgrade demanded’

hight ime, howmuch, even since, overhaul to, reagrd

Not Washed or Cooked, # 236

Two mangles were included in a short section of a marketing email received from Routledge, the academic publishing house, on 11 May, 2015 (full browser version here):

Following the link to the main page for French Grammar and Usage brings you to the website’s main page on the text, which varies the information slightly, but still repeats both of these mangles:

Link: Routledge — Taylor & Francis Group, ‘French Grammar and Usage’

seaparately

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 187

Des Pond of Slough may have found a new verb, but more likely just an omission:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘“It’s time to hold physical cash,” says one of Britain’s most senior fund managers’

time to money under the mattress

Multimangle, # 19

Des Pond of Slough has contributed part of a recent report on Michael Gove’s latest pronouncements, which the new Justice Secretary and the Telegraph reporter have rather mangled between them:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Stephen Fry corrected my “linguistic errors”, says Michael Gove’

In the first paragraph here, the phrases being discussed — ‘best-placed’ and ‘high quality’ — should be flagged, probably by quotation marks since newspapers tend to eschew italicization, as in fact occurs earlier in the report:

As for the instruction itself, Cambridge Dictionaries Online points out that hyphenation is becoming less common, probably (my hypothesis) because fewer people are being taught how to use hyphens properly or how to check a dictionary to determine their correct usage, and possibly also as an influence from scientific writing. However, anyone who has been faced with a stream of apparently random words, and left by the writer to work out their relations and connections, might well argue, on the basis that punctuation is intended to aid clarity, that hyphens should be used consistently and more often than not. It should not be up to the reader to guess what the writer meant, and while common usage might be a case for some changes in language, changes that compromise clarity of expression are not progressive and/or beneficial, but unhelpful to effective communication.

Paragraph two above substitutes ‘arc’ for ‘ark’. Given the relative position on the keyboard of c and k, it is hard to excuse this as a typographical slip, so it must be a homophonous error, however unlikely. Even if whoever first transcribed Gove’s words failed to recognize the term as a biblical reference, you’d have thought the journalist might have encountered Raiders of the Lost Ark, which, although an ‘oldie’, was the topic of a feature article in The Telegraph as recently as March 2015.

Finally, if Gove really said ‘unfitted’, I think he needs to call his grammar-guru Stephen Fry (see the article’s title) for more help. What he wants here is unfit, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as ‘not of the necessary quality or standard to meet a particular purpose’ and which is used of things; and not unfitted which, unless related to clothing or furniture, refers only to persons being ‘not fitted or suited for a particular task or vocation’.

unfitted for unfit; hyphenation; arc for ark

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 186

This error appears regularly in published works, and surprisingly often in academic books. More usually, only one part of the phrase is mangled, but today’s example follows through:

Robert A. Blank, The Price of Life: The Future of American Health Care (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 31. Online: Google Books

There are many more examples online: this morning, a Google Books search on the first part of the mangled phrase returned over 1,230 examples, and a search on the second part found over 1,060. A broader Google web search returned much higher results: 41,600,000 and 92,400,000 respectively. (In the latter case, the first two appear to be false positives, although these are likely to indicate an earlier error, now corrected.)

one the one hand; one the other hand

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 185

The writer of this piece starts by insulting anyone who obtained a degree at one of Coventry’s two universities more than a decade ago by entitling his article ‘Ten things you couldn’t do in Coventry ten years ago’ and then heading the first of his offerings ‘Get a first-rate education’. The text in this section goes on to mangle a key word and to use both a singular and a plural verb form with the same subject, as well as adopting a repetitive narrative formula:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Ten things you couldn’t do in Coventry ten years ago’

Unviersity; University of Warwick keeps; University of Warwick are

The Wrong Word Entirely, # 81

There are various mangles and oddities in this extract from an email sent in May by eBay, including some missing articles and some illogical verb tenses. The key issue is the word ‘language’, which is used rather strangely throughout. The last two paragraphs in particular seem to require something more specific, such as ‘terminology’ or ‘terms‘:

additional language, new language &c; missing articles; incorrect verb tenses

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 184

Noun-verb disharmony, easily avoided by proofreading, and an illogical preposition:

Link: Bucks Free Press, ‘Radnage residents fight against plans to turn the Three Horseshoes pub into a house’

plans […] was

You Cannot Be Serious, # 46

A hideous grammatical mangle spotted by Des Pond of Slough:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Hunter Treschl speaks about the moment a shark bit off his arm’

The news item comes from the USA, and thus the writer may well be American, but Merriam-Webster confirms in the following example that the past participle should be bitten, as in UK-English: ‘The patient had been bitten by a poisonous snake.’

arm bit off