What the hell is going on at yahoo.com? Yahoo! has changed the look of its front page. It now contains less text written by Yahoo! staffers and the text that is there is obscured by background noise. Maybe that’s a good thing, considering the degradation of quality in the writing. It just seems to get worse every day. Have all English-speaking writers and editors quit? Is the company now left with scribes who are still trying to learn the language?
Take a gander at some of the worst bit of nonsense that’s appeared on the Yahoo! front page in a long time:
I don’t even know where to begin with this, but I’ll try. Let’s start with the word conniving. It means “scheming, plotting, or colluding.” It’s also an intransitive verb, meaning it does not take an object. You can’t scheme, plot, or collude fans. It is impossible. And what the heck is “bandwagon fans”? Aren’t they just fans? They aren’t on any bandwagon — not that the writer knows what a bandwagon is. And you don’t refer to people (and by “people,” I mean “bandwagon fans”) with that; you use who.
What’s happening at Yahoo!?
February 21, 2013 at 3:26 pm
Given the trend of Yahoo! writing quality, I expect the day to come soon when an article will contain more errors than words.
February 21, 2013 at 5:45 pm
I’m sure you’re right. They’ll come up with a way to misspell every word, capitalize the wrong words, and add a few extraneous apostrophes.
February 22, 2013 at 7:38 am
I understand occasional typos or common errors (e.g., “none of us were”). I’m not excusing them, but people do make mistakes. I make those mistakes sometimes.
However, I can’t imagine how a nonsensical construction like the one in the screen shot above came into existence. Assuming gremlins and elves are fictional, someone had to decide that a sentence belonged there and then wrote that one. But why write one that doesn’t mean anything? Why not write, “Eggplant, banana car racing allows lunchtime when does the game start?” or “Eleven chickens winning the lottery because Wednesday belongs to voter-registration fraud”?
If Yahoo! wants to pay me $5 per headline, I can come up with gibberish all day.
February 22, 2013 at 8:11 am
My theory: This was written by a new hire. Probably the same person who wrote that Laura Bush was “irked at” an ad and John McCain met with his “home-state constituents.” In other words, someone whose mastery of the language was not questioned or tested before they were hired. And since it appears that Yahoo doesn’t employ editors who actually edit, everything that person writes gets posted without being checked first. I also suspect that the writer’s first language isn’t English. There are also huge numbers of people who consider themselves writers (and are paid to write) who can’t write a normal English sentence and don’t have the sense to recognize nonsense.