Kate Moss and Playboy

Kate Moss is posing as a playboy. Or posing for Playboy. Or posing with a playboy. Heck, I don’t know what she’s doing. And neither does the editor for Yahoo! Shine:

Racking up errors

Those Einsteins who write for the Yahoo! front page are racking up errors. This time it’s a missing word:

Writer is under fire

A writer for yahoo.com is under fire for what he wrote, or rather, for what he didn’t write:

I lied. The writer is not under fire because no one at Yahoo! cares that a word was omitted on one of the busiest pages on the Web.

Is that right?

In order to get this post written, I had to guess at the meaning of some words on the Yahoo! front page:

I knew that there was a word missing. But being tragically unhip, I was unsure of the expression “buffed-out look.” Is that like a “buff bod”? And the whole business with Wolverine — is that the title of a movie? I know that it’s a Hugh Jackman character, but quotation marks aren’t used around the name of character. So what’s up with that? Is there anything about that sentence that’s correct?

Written by a so-called professional?

Even so-called professional writers make grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes — especially if they work for Yahoo!. Take this example from Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where the writer believes that quotation marks belong after the expression “so-called”:

They don’t. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “Quotation marks are not used to set off descriptions that follow expressions such as so-called and self-styled, which themselves relieve the writer of responsibility for the attribution: his so-called foolproof method (not ‘foolproof method’).“

That’s a common mistake. On Yahoo!, there are a lot of common mistakes, like failing to match a pronoun with its antecedent (the word it refers to). And failing to hyphenate modern-day when it’s used as an adjective, misspelling Flintstones, and best of all using peddles instead of pedals:

This is more akin to a careless error:

And any decent spell-checker would have flagged Minnealpolis as a misspelling:

But for Yahoo!’s so-called journalists, spell-checking is optional. Heck, it’s not just optional, it’s nonexistent.

Just to be sure we understand that Jeff Stone is a Republican state representative, the writer tells us in two slightly different ways, each containing its own errors:

If you think I’m the only person who is appalled by this professional writer’s ignorance, you’d be wrong. Here’s one comment left by a reader:

“using peddles underneath their seats”
“PEDDLES”???? Jeezuz Joe Bob. My 6-year-old can write better than this. Apparently they’re trying to solve the unemployment problem by giving illiterate idiots jobs writing “news” articles. Sheesh.

What’s missing?

Don’t you think there’s a word missing in the caption on Yahoo! News?

I feel like there should be a preposition between “freedom” and “a long imprisonment.” I’m thinkin’ it’s “with.”

Were you hit on the head, too?

Looks like J. A. Happ wasn’t the only one hit on the head. The writer, editor, and proofreader for the Yahoo! front page seem to be suffering from a little cranial damage, too:

Which is worse?

Which is worse? Dropping a word:

or adding a redundant one?

Just ask the readers of the Yahoo! front page, the most visited page on the Internet.

Revising history and calling it the news

In this revisionist article from Yahoo! News, the writer claims that Newt Gingrich won the Republican primary last year. There is no word as the outcome of the actual presidential election:

This just goes to show ya what can happen when you drop a word or two: It’s the first time Mr. Gingrich has returned since winning the state’s Republican presidential primary.

Record for cheapest diamond broken?

A rare blue diamond recently sold for $1.8 million, breaking a record for what must have been the cheapest diamond in the world:

Thanks to Yahoo! Shine for illustrating (again!) the impact that a single word can have.