‘Dancing the with Stars’ is off

In a case of abbreviation transposition, the Yahoo! front page tells us that the engagement is off over at “Dancing the with Stars”:

Man sues behemoth burrito

Man v. food? I think not. Unless you’re writing about a court case, the abbreviation for versus is vs (or vs.), not this one used on Yahoo! TV:

Even a bad editor could improve this

“Daytime in No Time,” Yahoo! TV’s blog about daytime programs, could use a good editor. Heck, even a bad editor could find these errors:

Tech isn’t an abbreviation, it’s an informal word that’s OK in a blog and most other places. There’s no need for the period. What is needed is someone who has the initiative to check the spelling of Becky Worley’s name and cheerio.

Perhaps the same person would notice the unnecessary word here and would Google “Sweet Harts” to discover that the correct spelling is SweetHarts:

Crib slates and stangulation hazard

When the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of cribs, a Yahoo! Shine blogger covered the story with the misnamed CPCS, describing the crib slates and the possible stangulation hazard: 

Yeah, right. I’m sure I’d believe anything written by this blogger. There’s only three errors in one paragraph. It could be so much worse.

A hit and a miss

Reality-show hit “Real Housewives of New York” gets a bit of a miss on Yahoo! Shine with the incorrect period following the word Miss:

The courtesy title Miss isn’t an abbreviation. That’s one time that a missed period is a good thing.

World AIDS Day deserves better

World AIDS Day deserves better treatment than it gets from this error-laden special page from Yahoo! Events:

I don’t know the origin of the misspelling of syndrome or origin, but I suspect it’s just carelessness, as is the missing hyphen in gay-related. But what to make of the use of a singular verb (has) when the subject is plural?

Such a mistreatment is difficult to understand; perhaps the writer was in a hurry. That might explain the use of a comma where a period, colon, or semicolon is required:

There’s no shortage of periods in the initialism HIV, which doesn’t need them. And that which should be that: The clause is a restrictive one, meaning it’s necessary to identify the noun it modifies (marrow).

PDAs PDQ

Let me make this quick: The Yahoo! front page is wrong to use an apostrophe to form the plural of PDA. The correct plural of PDA is PDAs. Period. No apostrophe.

When TV doesn’t need another character

On the Yahoo! front page TVs get an unnecessary, incorrect character:

Abbreviations (e.g., i.e.) spawn confusion

Abbreviations can leave readers befuddled, especially abbreviations of Latin. They also befuddle some writers, as the Yahoo! Search blog illustrates:

The writer is giving an example of an athlete’s name, and the correct abbreviation is e.g. But why use an abbreviation at all and risk confusing your readers?

Groaning for growns up and shorter hours

If “all growns up” is slang that I’m unaware of, then this headline from Yahoo! Shine is fine — at least to the few readers familiar with the expression:

But, methinks it’s a typo. As for the abbreviated hr, I prefer my hours spelled out and at least 60 minutes long. Ignoring the missing period in the abbreviation, I wonder why one would abbreviate such a short word in this context. The min I saw it, I was confused.