There’s no bigger treat than this

For grammar nerds there’s no bigger treat than finding an error made by a professional writer. In this case, it’s by the author of Yahoo! TV’s “Daytime in No Time”:

More then one blunder

The writer makes more than one mistake in this article teaser  from Yahoo! Shine:

Not much better than the right word

It’s the nearly right word. But definitely the wrong word on Yahoo! TV:

Watt bettor weigh?

It’s knot not often that eye I fined find to two eras errors involving commonly confused words inn in a single paragraph. Butt But Yahoo!’s Flickr Developer blog manages that unusual feet feat:

And watt what bettor better weigh way too to end a day then than width with these grate great errors?

What could be better than than?

Nothing’s better than than when you’re making a comparison. Consider this excerpt from Yahoo! TV, and then make up your own mind:

If you’re in nyc, flout it

Some writers at Yahoo! Shine have a gift for introducing unusual spelling and creative punctuation in their writing. Take these examples from captions for holiday gifts, for example:

I suspect that tumber is meant to be either timber or tumbler. The redundant link and unnecessary comma are likely careless mistakes by someone who doesn’t proofread well (if at all). But I could use some help in deciphering this tidbit that supposedly describes a singleton’s relationship to caffeine:

I know I can’t live without my morning caffeine fix, but even without a coffee jolt, I’d never confuse than with then:

I thought that it was just a careless error, but noooo. Here it is again:

If you start a sentence with if, then it’s likely you’ll want to use then to introduce the next clause. If you’re using text-speak, you could omit the then. And, heck, omit any capital letters that are slowing you down! That’s what they do in NYC. While you’re flouting convention, throw in a gratuitous comma. Like between an adjective and the noun it modifies. Looks great!

It’s different from the correct word

The word then is quite different from the word than, which I think is what the writer of this excerpt from Yahoo! Events meant:

Of course, even than would be incorrect in that context. Incorrect, but not befuddling like the use of the pronoun these in the next sentence. A pronoun like these requires an antecedent—a noun that it refers to. Unfortunately, that noun is nowhere to be found. Also missing is the period at the end of the sentence. Not bad. A 5-word sentence with only two errors.

Defying explanation

I cannot imagine how a writer could make the mistake of not capitalizing Thanksgiving. But it’s happened before on Yahoo! Shine and it’s happened again:

It’s the kind of sloppy error that sends editors to the freezer searching for the peppermint schnapps. If you want to avoid further upsetting an editor, then don’t confuse than for then and don’t confuse the underscore for an actual punctuation mark:

The magazine Bon Appetit and its companion Web site are proper nouns, deserving of capital letters:

The only explanation I have for that error is that the Bon Appetit logo is all lowercase, and the writer mistakenly believed that you follow the style of the logo. Not so.

The following paragraph contains several errors, but I’ve circled only the most egregious. Can you guess what the error is?

If you guessed that the apostrophes are unnecessary, you’d be right. But you’d miss the most amusing error of all. The Thanksgiving menus in question are actually for folks in their 20s, 40s, and 60s. It’s an error that absolutely defies explanation.

More than confused

No word is more confused with than than then. This caption from Yahoo! Movies illustrates the point:

Phoning it in

Now that the good editors at Yahoo! Shine have corrected the teaser to an article on teenage daughters and talking to boys on the phone (reported here on Terribly Write), it’s time to look at the article itself.

Could it really be that the first sentence contains not one, but two, typos?

I think the writer meant “when I started talking” (unless I’m mistaken and she took on the phone the way a wrestler takes on an opponent in the ring). And that sentence containing those typos should have stopped with class. (The parenthetical sentences contain their own ending punctuation.)

The daughter mentioned in the next paragraph must have been a very, very young mom because she’s “overwhelmed by how fast her kids are growing up.”

 

It would make more sense if the girl’s mother were the one who’s overwhelmed. Yeah, that’s it. Let’s just call this a dangling modifier because the noun it modifies (Teresa A) is missing from the sentence. Nice one. A little comma after the word is would be helpful, and it would be consistent with that rule about commas and conjunctions separating independent clauses — the kind of stuff only high-school English teachers, grammarians, editors, and careful writers fuss about.

Finally, there’s the use of than instead of then and the superfluous the in the closing paragraph:

Do you think that the writer reread this before publishing it, or was it just phoned in?