I forgot

I was going to write a headline for Yahoo! Shine, but I forgot what I was going to say:

A smorgasbord of errors on yahoo.com

The Yahoo! front page, home of the Web’s most visited site, offers us a potpourri of perfidious proofreading problems, starting with Pilates:

Pilates is a proper noun; it gets a capital P.

Proper punctuation eludes the proofreaders, too, with this missing comma:

Jimmy Buffett is not a buffet, which is like a smorgasbord, but with an early bird special:

Is that a period, a decimal point, or just another typo?

Rounding out the problems on yahoo.com is the worst misstep of them all:

An embarrassing misstep

How embarrassing! Misspelling misstep on the home page of Yahoo! News:

It’s an everyday occurrence every day

It seems that nearly every day there’s some bit of fiction on Yahoo! Shine. Something that the writer just made up to incite the site’s dozens of readers. This time the lie  appears on the home page and involves the USDA and its alleged ban on milk:

Of course, the USDA didn’t ban milk. But the writer doesn’t feel it necessary to be precise. Or accurate. Also on that page, you’ll find:

It’s not exactly a secret that the lingerie store is Victoria’s Secret.

You can see mistakes like this on Yahoo! Shine every day:

Now they’re not even trying

I think the editors who work on the Yahoo! front page have just given up. They’re not even trying to produce quality writing.

They’ve given up on punctuation, adding an incorrect hyphen after the adverb newly:

They’re not even trying to spell words right. Maybe they think that two words that rhyme must be spelled alike. Someone please hand them a cheat sheet with some common misspellings:

There’s no excuse to misspell Steve Carell’s name — unless it’s “I don’t give a sh*t.”

Still having trouble with health care

It’s still a problem on the Yahoo! front page: How to spell health care when it’s used as a compound modifier. In the past, the folks working for the Internet giant have called it health care, health-care, and even healthcare. But the editors still can’t make up their mind:

How hard is it to make a decision and stick to it? Apparently too hard for Yahoo! staffers.

It’s kind of astounding

Mistakes happen every day on yahoo.com, one of the busiest pages on the Web. But some mistakes are so egregious that even a jaded ol’ biddy like me is flabbergasted by the astounding ignorance they betray.

Take a simple little word like a. How the heck did the writer think that a L.A.  is correct? Unless the writer pronounces L.A. as “lah.” Then it would be correct; dumb, but correct:

Oh, and that 90s thing? It needs an apostrophe before it to indicate that there’s some numbers missing. But that’s not the worst mistake of the day. This is:

An apostrophe to form a plural? Really? Astounding.

Women makes careless mistakes

It’s actually just one woman writing for Yahoo! Shine who’s really careless. Or she just doesn’t know the difference between a woman and some women:

I’m going with “careless.” How else do you explain the fact that she’s writing about an art exhibit and can’t get the exhibit’s name right (it’s “I Throw Myself at Men”) or the artist’s name right (she’s Lilly McElroy):

(The lowercase W in web might be right; it might be wrong. If Yahoo! had a standard for spelling this word, then we’d know if it is correct. Right now, Yahoo! writers use both Web and web.)

Oh, in case you want to see samples of the photographer’s artwork, the writer has generously supplied two identical slide shows for your viewing pleasure:

I’m sure she meant to do that because nobody could be that careless.

Out of sight . . .

Now that Rep. Michele Bachmann is no longer making headlines for her bid to win the Republican presidential nomination, no one at Yahoo! News can remember how to spell her name:

This is not at all surprising

It’s pretty bad when a professional writer makes this many mistakes in a single paragraph:

Bad, but not surprising, since this appeared on Yahoo! Shine. Shine’s writers are not known for their command of the English language or the accuracy of their noodlings. So, it’s not surprising to find the writer doesn’t know :

• The movie is Bridesmaids (plural), not Bridesmaid.
• The actress is Melissa McCarthy, not that mess the writer created.
• The movie is Albert Nobbs (not Albert Nobb) and it needs italics like the other movie titles.

Best of all is the contention that the five ladies were nominated as actors. No. They are actresses to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and were nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.