Give up the reins

If you make mistakes like those made by the author of Yahoo! Sports‘ “Puck Daddy,” you should consider letting someone take the reins and edit your work:

If you don’t know that a monarch reigns and a horse is controlled by reins, you need a little editorial support.

If you’re writing an article about Glen Gulutzan, the editor might let you know if you misspell his name:

And if that editor knows that whom is the objective case of who (and is therefore correct as the object of a preposition), hand over the reins. Just be sure that the editor knows that when a subject is joined by or, the verb (which should be is) agrees with the noun closer to it:

One of these is wrong

Let’s hope that one of these words on Yahoo! News is a typo, because I’d hate to think a professional scribe thinks both words are correct:

Phoningitin

Is this what happens when a “journalist” uses a cell phone to write an article? Does it always result in missing spaces, grammatical errors, and typos? Or are these errors unique to Yahoo! News‘ “The Lookout”?

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:

Here comes more of the same

I wasn’t going to mention this mistake on the home page Yahoo! Movies — it’s likely just a typo, right?

And then I saw this on Yahoo! Movies and figured maybe the Einsteins who write these captions really are grammatically challenged:

All I needed was one more example of a subject and verb mismatch to convince I was right:

“Men in Black 4″ is the title of a movie. It is singular and takes a singular verb like, oh, say, maybe comes.

This may not loner be your best option

Looking for some well-written articles about odd happenings around the world? Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow” has the quirky news stories; it’s the “well-written” part that’s missing:

I have no idea if “at least one” official has said something or multiple officials have said something. I also have no idea what they said.

And then I stopped reading

You can tell a lot about an article by its first paragraph. At least I think you can. After reading this opening paragraph from Yahoo! Sports‘ “From the Marbles,” I stopped reading:

I really don’t know if the rest of the article is as bad as this. But when a single sentence contains at least one typo (and maybe two) and a violation of the subject-verb agreement rule, chances are the rest of the article isn’t going to be an improvement.

Moves mimics stars?

Did you read this on yahoo.com?

Did you notice that the writer tried to tell us that some teen’s moves are like some NBA stars — not like NBA stars’ moves, but like the actual athletes themselves? And did you notice that the writer didn’t know that moves is plural and mimics, the verb, isn’t?

You wrote wha?

There is just no explanation for this caption, except maybe that the writer, editor, proofreader and anyone involved with Yahoo! Shine were all non-English speakers high on glue when this was published:

You guys slay me!

And not in a good way. Trying to make a noun like slay into a verb is just hilarious.

Today’s laugh of the day comes to you courtesy of the Yahoo! front page team.