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.

One of them is probably right

What do you do when you’re unsure of the use of the hyphen? Should you hyphenate two words or leave them open? Just do what the editors at the Yahoo! front page do:

You’re sure to be right — once.

What kind of eggs do turtles poach?

Oh, dopey me. I thought that poachers were stealing turtle eggs in Costa Rica. But according to Yahoo! News it’s the turtles that are doing the poaching:

This is the news?

It’s not news to readers of  Yahoo! News that the writers and editors frequently make mistakes, including these that appeared at the same time on the same page:

That is supposed to be “Star Wars,” of course. And the Barbie Dreamhouse is trademarked:

And so is Ping-Pong:

The common noun for the sport is “table tennis.”

Peekaboo boo-boo part two

What dictionary did the writer for the Yahoo! front page use to check the spelling of this?

According to the dictionary you’ll find on Yahoo! (the American Heritage Dictionary), there’s no hyphens in peekaboo. According to the folks at yahoo.com, there are two of them.

It’s like a Tom-Hanks movie

What was the writer for yahoo.com thinking?

Putting a hyphen in Triple Crown (even when it’s used to modify a noun) is like hyphenating a name. You wouldn’t write “Tom-Hanks movie” or “Barack-Obama speech,” would you? Oh, I guess if you’re a Yahoo! staffer you probably would.

Where was your head when you wrote that?

I don’t want to even think about where the writer’s head was when he wrote this headline for Yahoo! Sports‘ “Big League Stew”:

The expression is “head over heels” and it means “to roll, as in a somersault.”

A 5-year-old would know better

Even a 5-year-old would know that there’s a hyphen missing from this caption on Yahoo! Shine:

Splitting up a nonprofit

Is there a nonprofit organization that might help the folks working at the keyboards at Yahoo! News? Maybe the Internet giant would accept free proofreading services if a nonprofit suggests it:

Not a Mensa member?

You don’t have to be brilliant to know that some writers for Yahoo! Shine aren’t exactly geniuses — at least when it comes to trivial parts of their job, like being able to spell and write with accuracy.

Kaiser Permanente is apparently too difficult for this writer to spell — or even just Google:

She seems to think that the word the is part of a family name (it shouldn’t be capitalized) and that only one person in the family has a lawyer (the apostrophe should be after the S):

Ah! There’s that apostrophe again. This time it’s not there to show possession but to create a plural. Which, of course, is wrong:

The Nikolayevs live in California, so it’s a little odd that their son would be moved to a hospital 3,000 miles away in Stamford, Connecticut. You’d think he’d be taken to Stanford Hospital, which is about 2,950 miles closer to home. But a writer who thinks that Child Protectice Services is a real agency, probably thinks Stamford is in California.

So, she’s obviously convinced you can form the plural of a name with an apostrophe and an S, and she has no idea that when you’re referring to Mom, it gets a capital letter (although if she meant “the mom,” it doesn’t).

And smack-dab in the middle of the article is a link, that the writer gets wrong on two counts: a missing hyphen in 5-year-old and the miscapitalized Mensa — an organization for high-IQ folks. I don’t think this writer is a member.