Kate Hudson is not Kate Winslet

Allow me to deviate from my normal nitpicking about terrible typos, grammatical gaffes, and monstrous misspellings to point out a writer’s responsibility beyond creating literate prose. Inaccurate writing is also terrible writing.

In this article from Yahoo! Shine, titled “Worst Way to Entertain Your Kids Ever: Introducing the Tot-Tanic,” the writer considers the loss of more than 1500 passengers an “American tragedy” — in spite of the fact the ship was of UK registry with passengers from around the globe.

I’m willing to overlook the writer’s US-centricity and concede that it was a tragedy. But placing actress Kate Hudson in the movie about the sinking of the ocean liner is so tragic an error that I can’t let it pass unnoticed. At least the writer spelled Hudson correctly.

I think I forgot something

Could it be the apostrophe in this headline from Yahoo! Shine?

Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s, Parkinson’s. These diseases have one thing in common — an apostrophe.

Congress loses a letter

Congress is one letter short in this headline from today’s Yahoo! Shine:  

It’s just a typo

It’s just a typo on the Yahoo! Shine home page today, but it doesn’t make a good impression on the reader since it is so blatant: 

Warning: Train wreck ahead

Numerous and egregious spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors can produce a train wreck of text and derail readers. Take this article from Yahoo! Shine, for example:

Could there be more errors? Possibly. My pen ran out of red ink as I was circling the slip-ups. Here are the ones I noted:

• There’s a hyphen missing from health-conscious state.
• The plural yogis doesn’t need an apostrophe.
• Where’s the comma after etc.?
• There’s a missing hyphen before the misspelled laden. It should be trans-fat-laden.
• Why capitalize the when referring to the Terminator?
• The word bucks is redundant after an amount preceded by a dollar sign
• BBC News needs a few capital letters.
• The word this doesn’t need a capital letter.

Did you find others that I missed?

What she say hapened, now she says happened

I’m happy to report that two of the three errors in this Yahoo! Shine snippet have been corrected:

The subject and verb now agree in the first sentence. Happened is spelled as it should be. The only thing missing is the apostrophe in ’90s. Not bad.

All-new Coffey going home?

This excerpt from a blog on Yahoo! TV about “Nashville Star” contestant Coffey confused me. I knew there was an error in there somewhere:

Nu name for Julie Newmar

Why would a writer change the name of actress Julie Newmar to Julie Numar? The writer of this excerpt from Yahoo! Shine borrows the actress’ words from “In Case You Didn’t Know,” but took the liberty of altering her name:

Now appearing Knightley

Small-chested women are quite different from women who are small and chested, a fact that is apparently lost by the writer of this piece on Yahoo! Shine. A simple hyphen would fix the problem:

But the misspelling of the first and last name of actress Keira Knightley is another matter. Next time, I suggest the author google the actress.

Things we don’t get: hyphens

Like, where do we use them? How about putting them in an age, like 22-year-old? But, don’t put them in perfectly good words like overrated. See example below from Yahoo! Shine for details: