Recently the Yahoo! front page featured an ugly grammatical mistake, with the correlative conjunction both…and joining to unequal, nonparallel elements:
Of course Terribly Write took them to task (with almost no snark), even providing three alternatives to turn the embarrassment into a grammatically correct sentence.
Knowing that the editors on yahoo.com use Terribly Write as their de facto editor (because I think Yahoo! has no competent editors), I wasn’t surprised when they made a stab at correcting the error:
Faced with three correct alternatives, what did the editors at yahoo.com choose? None of them. Instead, they rewrote the grammatically incorrect sentence, producing a different grammatically incorrect sentence. Brilliant.
