Welcome. Now go away

Welcome to Yahoo! Shine! At least you’d expect a warm welcome when you visit the home page of this site. What you get instead is a typo here:

And some questionable grammar here:

Is this what the writer really meant: Why don’t men match up with women’s libidos? Or did the writer mean that men and women have the same libidos. (OK, we all know that ain’t right.) If the writer meant “Why don’t men’s libidos match up with women’s libidos,” then that’s a whole ‘nother story. It should be: Why don’t men’s and women’s libidos match up?

If you visited yesterday, you’d have been welcomed by this teaser about a tragic shopping car accident:

If you’re thinking it involves someone driving a MINI into a Kroger’s, you’d be thinking wrong. The accident involved a shopping cart.

Turning the tables

I don’t often read about sports online or in print. It’s not because I’m not a sports fan; it’s just that reading about sports bores me. But when I saw a teaser on yahoo.com about a mom, Facebook, and her two football-playing sons, I had to click over to this article on Yahoo! Sports.

I’m so sorry I did. It just gave me more fodder for Terribly Write, and lordie knows I don’t need more gaffes and goofs to write about.

It started with the incorrect singular lineman, which should be the plural linemen. I couldn’t help but stumble on ”turn the table.”  The expression is “turn the tables,” with the plural tables. Don’t ask me why; it just is.

I think we’ve established there were two players, so the apostrophe belongs after the S:

And this apostrophe doesn’t belong here or anywhere else in the sentence:

See why I don’t read Yahoo! Sports. It’s mostly good, except when it isn’t.

Time to lose that spelling

It’s time to clarify a little something for the writer for Yahoo! Movies: You made a mistake in choosing looses over loses:

Perhaps the confusion about the two words stems from incorrect pronunciation. Loose rhymes with noose and moose. Lose, the correct word, rhymes with news and ooze.

Can’t make up your mind?

Can’t decide which of two options is the right one? Choose them both. That seems to be the philosophy of the editor for the Yahoo! front page, who uses two spellings for the same group:

Both spellings are accepted in the general news community — but not on the same page. Really, how hard would it be for Yahoo! to settle on a preferred spelling and use it?

Editor’s unlikely new job

Any professional writer or editor who omits an apostrophe in a possessive form is not likely to get a similar job elsewhere. No, wait. I take that back. They may be qualified to work on the Yahoo! front page, where knowledge of punctuation rules is purely optional:

Here’s a tip about the Rubik’s Cube

This tip is for the writer who works on the Yahoo! front page: Rubik’s Cube is a trademark. It has a big R and a big C.

Camila Alves plus a bit

It’s supposed to be Camila Alves on Yahoo! Movies, but the model gets a slight addition:

Is this a racist Freudian slip of the fingers?

I don’t really believe the senior media reporter for Yahoo! News‘ “The Cutline” is racist. I was just trying to get your attention. But it does seem odd to me in an article about the trial of Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s physician, the reporter mentions a trial of someone named Black:

The reporter was really referring to the trial of Dr. Murray, who happens to be African American.

By George! It’s Martin Scorsese!

Well, it’s almost Martin Scorsese on the home page of Yahoo! Music:

Does this writer have a ‘punctuation problem’?

Uh, yes. The reporter for Yahoo! News has a bit of difficulty finding the right place for a question mark:

In the U.S., a comma and period go before a closing quotation mark; a semicolon and colon go after. The exclamation mark and question mark go before or after the closing quotation mark, depending on the context. In this case, the question is not “Bridge to Nowhere” — the entire headline is the question.