Slippery slop

There’s an amazing article on Yahoo! Shine. Amazing in the variety and number of sloppy errors one writer can make and inflict on the public. From the overly punctuated quotations here:

and here:

to the unnecessary and duplicated words here:

There’s a mysterious expression that defies explanation:

And the use of a zero instead of the letter O:

WTF? How does the writer not see this little bit of HTML when proofreading?

Silly me. Clearly the writer doesn’t proofread, because if she did, she’d notice that this is the wrong word:

Injecting a little humor, the writer continues with the slop:

Not that this is the worst error ever, but a missing article here makes the whole sentence a tad awkward:

Poor Dad. He’s deserving of a capital letter here:

Humor again! I love it! The writer was hoarding the hilarious homophonous errors, but is sharing them with the reader:

This slippery slop may just get the writer a jump-start on reconsidering her career choice:

Overly used hyphens and hordes of errors

A writer on Yahoo! Shine makes three rookie errors in a single paragraph:

A hyphen doesn’t belong after an adverb ending in LY. For some reason, folks often confuse horde and hoard. Hordes are large groups; hoards are hidden supplies saved for future use. I don’t get it, just like I don’t get how the typo feet for feel goes uncorrected.

Hoarding homophonous errors

As a hoarder of homophonous errors, I’m adding this example from Yahoo! Shine to my collection:

Distressing over language

Why is it that the writers at Yahoo! Shine can’t write a sentence without accidentally omitting a word?

And why is correct spelling such a foreign concept? So foreign that two misspellings appear in one sentence in the same article:

Jell-o is a trademark that requires a capital letter and a hyphen. Squishing it together could give the gelatin salad a touch of claustrophobia. Claustrophobia’s an easy word to spell if you pronounce it correctly. It’s very phonetic.

This is all so distressing. I could use a bottle of Shiraz (with a cap). I wouldn’t hoard it, nor give it to raging hordes of illiterates:

Since the ’80s and ’90s (and decades before then), I knew to put the apostrophe where numbers or letters are missing. Wish the writer of this article knew as much:

Errors like that are depressing, but I have no intention of locking myself in a bathroom with or without an extra “with a”:

Maybe a warm bath would help. I’d be tempted to add Epsom salts to the water. Epsom salts. it requires a cap E and an S at the end:

I know that because I often refer to the dictionaries and other reference works that I keep on a bookshelf:

Finally, for real stress relief, I recommend a class in Pilates:

Or better yet, a class in English.

Plum crazy errors

I love farmers’ markets. But a farmer’s market probably doesn’t offer the variety of produce that I’m used to where more than one farmer shows up. The writer of this article on Yahoo! Shine feels otherwise:

Displaying a common error, this paragraph includes a hyphen after an adverb ending in LY (it’s unnecessary and wrong) and omits the words “and to” between age and get:

More significant is the omitted “vitamin you need.” In this case, it’s vitamin A. Worst of all is the inclusion of vitamin B12 as a nutrient in plums. Since the only sources of B12 are animal products (like eggs, meat, and milk), I think there’s a credibility gap here.

Finally, I’m flummoxed by the expression “last grasps at summer grilling.” Could this be a last-gasp attempt at comprehensible writing? Or is the writer hoarding more grammatical gaffes like they were produce from a farmers’ market?

HIV, The New York Times, and swarms of condoms

I admit that I couldn’t follow the logic in this Yahoo! Shine blog post on the somber subject of HIV. Maybe I lost my motivation to concentrate when I read the first sentence:

“The Gray Lady,” The New York Times, likes its name spelled with four capitalized words. Ah, well. I continued on to the next sentence. It may seem counterintuitive, but when I see a word containing a gratuitous hyphen, my trust in the accuracy of the content fades, and my mind begins to wander.

I think my brain continued to drift until I reached the paragraph about 80- and 90-degree weather. I snapped to attention. Huh? The “temperatures” in question were really decades, without the apostrophes that signal an omission. They should be ’80s and ’90s.

I persevered until I encountered this sentence that reminded me why sentences written for the Web should be short:

It also reminded me that some writers and editors still don’t know where a question mark goes when a sentence ends with a quotation mark. 

Finally, I met an error that truly grabbed my attention:

I’ve been hoarding that gaffe for more than a day, just waiting until the vision of swarming condoms dissipated.

Hoarding hordes help

Yahoo! TV features a story from the Associated Press about lots and lots of volunteers helping to build a house on “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”:

Apparently some of those volunteers had a hidden supply of something. Maybe it was dictionaries!