Can we all agree that to form the plural of a proper noun ending in Y, you just add an S? So, the plural of Molly is Mollys, the plural of Bobby is Bobbys and the plural of Furby is Furbys, right? Great, then we can move right past the first error here from Yahoo! Shopping and get to the fun part:
I’ve been waiting for a toy with sounds that moved.
Some writers have a way with words. They know how to create images, how to create moods, how to create excitement. This is not one of those writers. She writes for Yahoo! Shine, which is not exactly like writing for the National Review, or even the National Enquirer.
She’s written an article about Sophia Loren, who at 78 years old is still a great beauty. And who somehow proves that beauty isn’t wasted on the young. So that means that the young make good use of beauty? Or that there are no young beauties? I actually have no idea what this is supposed to mean:
But that’s not all. Ms. Loren was attending an event with some models from the 1920s:
At least I think the apostrophe means that some numbers (like “19″) are missing. The arbitrary comma is the kind of mistake this writer often makes.
On the red carpet, all eyes were posing with actors while simultaneously focusing on Ms. Loren:
Hey, that sentence may have a misplaced modifier, but at least it had a verb. That’s more than can be said for this collection of words:
Yes, this writer has a way with words. The wrong way.
Please ignore what you read on Yahoo! Movies: We were not written by Terence Winter. Rather, this sentence, which was written by a Yahoo! person, has a misplaced modifier:
We would expect nothing short of embarrassing gaffes from Yahoo!, including one that elicits smirks. At least the writers aren’t engaging in illicit behavior (as far as we know). They are, however, engaging in grammatical assaults with this claim that both Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Lumley play the same characters in an upcoming film:
(To indicate that the actors’ characters are different, the writer should have added a little apostrophe and S to DiCaprio.)
Hope Solo, the American soccer star, was conceived in prison. As luck would have it, so was her father:
What’s even more shocking: The Olympian served time for embezzlement.
Did you see what the writer for Yahoo! Shine did there? She created some pretty funny misplaced modifiers. The phrase “conceived in jail…” modifies “father” and “after serving time…” modifies Hope. And no competent editor was around to modify those two sentences.
One writer, one article, lots of amusing gaffes. This must be Yahoo! Shine:
Some are minor, like neglecting the camel-case in YouTube. Others would embarrass any writer who takes pride in her work:
(A regiment is a military unit of ground troops or a large group of people. A regimen is a system intended to promote health or other beneficial effect.)
A bad headpiece includes a hyphen. Not such a gross error. But an Oreo cookie wearing glasses? Brilliant!
(That’s actually a dangling participle — wearing is the participle (or verb acting as an adjective) and it’s dangling because the noun it’s supposed to modify is nowhere in sight. Instead, it appears to modify the noun following the participial phrase “wearing the glasses.”)
The eyes, it seems, are a single window:
And extraneous words are the essentially the same as unnecessary words:
So, let’s get to the point: This article sucks. It has its potential grammatical uses — but only as an example of what not to do.
The truth finally comes out: President Obama has a hairpiece. And he hangs his hair in the West Wing of the White House. And he’s left it there for three years. Once again the writer for Yahoo! News‘ “The Cutline” is first with the breaking news:
In case you missed seeing the accompanying picture, the writer helpfully included it twice:
Know nothing about movies? Unable to form a grammatically correct sentence? Spelling-challenged? Then you, too, could be a writer for Yahoo! Movies, where actual knowledge of any kind is purely optional.
You don’t need to know how to spell Mario Puzo’s name; you don’t even have to Google it to find the correct spelling. Spell it any way you like:
You don’t need facts; it’s OK to call a man’s wife his ex-wife. You don’t need to understand the meaning of words like forced. Using it when you mean ordered is okie-dokie:
If you think that Jerry Lewis is actually a duo, then this will sound fine to you. If you think that the duo in question is actually Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and you can spot a dangling modifier, don’t bother applying to Yahoo! Movies. You’re just too knowledgeable:
And if you think Frankenstein was the mad scientist’s monster, and not the scientist himself, you’re hired!
This sucks. So say readers of Yahoo! Shine who can recognize when a verb doesn’t match its subject:
But the writer’s not content to stop with two grammatical mistakes. She has no idea when to capitalize words. Unless she’s talking about a TV character played by Matt LeBlanc, joey shouldn’t get a capital letter:
A joey is a baby kangaroo, often labeled an exotic animal — just like Ms. Carr, whom I’d really like to meet:
When a well-known person passes away, the Web is awash with tributes. In a departure, the senior feature editor for Yahoo! Shine has written something of a tribute to the women in Steve Jobs’ life. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a grab bag of errors that’s more insulting than inspiring.
Mr. Jobs has been described as a private person and a brilliant egoist. Who knew that his wife Laurene shared those traits?
We all know that the writer made a mistake by placing that phrase before Laurene. But what can you expect from a writer who doesn’t know that Buddhist is a proper noun and the compound modifier billion-dollar needs a hyphen?
Mr. Jobs’ birth mother was a graduate student:
He was an 11-year-old:
Maybe this writer should just forget trying to use punctuation. She should just stick to using letters, numbers, and the Space bar, because she has no clue where to stick those little commas and apostrophes. And maybe she just ought to stick with writing in the present tense, because the past tense of some verbs (like forbid) alludes her (it’s forbade):
How many children did Mr. Jobs’ birth parents have? At least three, if you can believe this writer. There was Steve, his sister, and another sister:
(The fact is, his birth parents had another child, a daughter.) It looks like Piper is starting to take my advice and omit punctuation. She’s dropped a comma and the quotation marks around the book title. Good start!
Oops. She’s fallen back on her old ways and included an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong:
and a comma where it has no business being:
There’s more problems with her use of the Shift key when it comes to Zen Buddhist and Stanford business school. (Only the full name of the school, Stanford Graduate School of Business should be capitalized.) Readers can’t overlook the mismatch of program and foster (which should be fosters):
It’s meant to be some sort of tribute to the women in Steve Jobs’ life, but it’s really a tribute to carelessness and grammatical ignorance.
This could have been so much worse, but the writer for Yahoo! Shine merely flirted with a writing disaster. She makes what are now common errors (for her) by capitalizing and hyphenating stateside:
And she uses apostrophes in place of quotation marks. Worse is her implication that there are few TV series dedicated to flirting:
Puh-leeze. This writer shouldn’t try to use words of more than two syllables. She’s not adept at handling big words. It doesn’t require overanalysis to see the problem. And when referring to a blogger, she just can’t get the name right. (It’s Carly Spindel.) She should definitely skip the use of commas; it’s not employed nearly as frequently as a period.
This goof goes against everything our mothers taught us:
My mother taught me to take pride in everything I do.
