This doesn’t come cheap

In writing, mistakes don’t come cheap. The price you pay is your credibility and reputation. If you’re a writer for Yahoo! Movies, perhaps that’s not a priority for you; after all, you can make grammatical goofs all day long and still have a job:

The word cheap is both an adjective and an adverb. As an adverb, it’s generally used with verbs of buying and selling and follows the word it modifies. So, “talent didn’t come cheap” is correct, and the use of cheaply in that context is considered hypercorrection — the result of thinking you know so much about grammar that you make a fool of yourself in public.

Not that Sasha Cohen

Someone with an uncanny likeness to Sacha Baron Cohen attended the premiere of “Les Miserables” with Isla Fisher:

Even the guy’s name is eerily similar, although according to Yahoo! Movies, he’s Sasha Cohen:

Do you think the Einsteins at Yahoo! confused the actor with this Sasha Cohen?

I can see how they could confuse the two.

Bring it back to the States

There’s more and more evidence that outsourcing writing for an American audience to a non-English-speaking country produces embarrassing, and sometimes laughable, results.

Is there anyone who has lived in the United States for the last month who hasn’t seen the word Democrat — with its capital D — eleven-seventy times? So, what other explanation could there be for that embarrassment on yahoo.com?

It’s not a contraction

Well, actually, it is a contraction: It’s is a contraction of it is or it has. It’s quite different from its, which is a possessive pronoun. Except on Yahoo! News, where it’s a stand-in for the correct word:

Your gig might be up

That writing gig might come to an end for the person who that this made was a common English expression:

The idiom is “the jig is/was up.” It means that the game or trick is over, done, kaput. The “gig was up” means that the job is over, done, kaput.

I don’t really think the writer’s gig is in jeopardy. This appeared in Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where writers are not know for their journalistic integrity or mastery of English. Her job is safe there.