Guess what’s not a question

Guess what’s not a question in this headline from Yahoo! Shine:

If you guessed both sentences in that headline, you are correct.

 

Is that your question?

The Yahoo! omg! editor asks the intriguing question: Brave?

Perhaps the writer thought that in American English, all punctuation goes before a closing quotation mark. Not so! Only a period and comma go there; a question mark or exclamation mark go there only if it applies to the words in quotes. And it this case, it doesn’t.

I’ll give you a profanity-laced tirade

Maybe there’s a broken key on the yahoo.com writer’s keyboard — the key that would turn “profanity laced” into a compound adjective that modifies “tirade”:

That key would be a hyphen, which is used to join two words that individually can’t modify a noun.

What company do you work for?

How often do you have to tap out the name of the company you work for? And how often do you get it wrong? If you work for Yahoo!, you might just forget that the exclamation mark is part of the company’s name. But if you remember to include the mark, do you know where it goes? Not where the writer for Yahoo! Finance put it:

Caught off-guard

I was caught off-guard by the lack of a hyphen in the adjective on the Yahoo! front page:

You didn’t take the pill, did you?

I’m guessin’ that the person responsible for this caption on Yahoo! Shine didn’t take that pill that makes you smarter:

The plural of doc is docs; the possessive form is doc’s.

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?

A Penney for your thoughts

The writer for Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow” is pretty free with freeway in this redundant use of the word:

He’s also pretty free with the spelling of the article’s subject. It’s an article about JC Penney, not about the copper coin:

Proving that he doesn’t need to do any fact-checking, he even misspells the retail giant’s URL:

If a tea kettle is formerly known as “Bells and Whistles,” what is it called now? And does it have a new, formal name?

Of course, most people aren’t taking the writer’s work too seriously. They know that he’s somewhat of a hack whose writing would benefit from the watchful eye of a competent editor. I’m thinking, maybe an editor who knows that a series doesn’t involve a single commentary, but multiple commentaries:

I suppose if the writer doesn’t care about spelling and word usage, he also doesn’t care too much about punctuation. Perhaps he feels that a period between sentences is optional:

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.

Just move it to the left

There’s nothing wrong with this caption on Yahoo! Shine that moving the apostrophe to the left wouldn’t fix:

The apostrophe should be used to show the omission of digits (in this case, 19), and not to form the plural of a decade: ’60s is correct.