Oh no it didn’t! When I read this on Yahoo! Shine, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Had the Gray Lady actually made this mistake?
Don’t be silly. Of course not. The Yahoo! writer screwed up and substituted the word that means “making light or lighter or brightening” for the word lightning.
How fast is “lightening speed”? Is it the rate it takes to bleach a red T-shirt pink? Is it as fast as lightning speed, which is the rate at which Yahoo! Shine writers make mistakes?
A mistake on Yahoo! News’ “The Ticket” can become a lightning rod for criticism, especially when the writer doesn’t know the difference between lightning and lightening:
Lightening means “making lighter”; lightning is the stuff that accompanies thunder.
Reading this article on Yahoo! Shine had me wondering: What happens when a “mega-mansion” is struck by lightening? It gets lighter. Black turns to gray; beige turns to white; red turns to pink. It could be worse: It could be struck by lightning. That would be bad. Like, burning up the house bad.
Not really bad, but really wrong was failure to capitalize Boy Scout:
A premiere is the opening or debut of a movie or play. Premier means “first in position or rank.” Guess which word the writer should have used here:
Oh, this is relatively unimportant after those errors, but the writer placed that period in the wrong place. It belongs after the right parenthesis because it applies to the entire sentence, not just the words in the parens.
Congratulations! You’ve won the Most Boneheaded Errors in Fewest Words award. I’m talking to you, the guy who wrote this for Yahoo! News‘ “The Lookout”:
Why this honor now? It’s simply in recognition of your inability to tell the difference between lightening and lightning (the thing that accompanies thunder). Your consideration for your readers, ensuring that they understand that dead birds were found dead (and not tweeting). Your profound ignorance of punctuation (including the use of the comma after a city and state) and creative spelling of what others would call New Year’s Day.
I’m sure you’ll want to make an acceptance speech. Please don’t thank your high school English teachers for helping you reach this pinnacle of journalism. I think they’d be a tad embarrassed.
I’m not sure how a round gets put on a diet or maybe grows paler, but I’m pretty sure the writer for Yahoo! Shine could tell us:
She could probably tell us why she has so much trouble with punctuation and with capitalizing trademarks like BlackBerry correctly:
There it is again! And it’s accompanied by some random capital letters in a common noun:
Oy. Let’s be clear: prime ministers and journalists are just like regular folks. They don’t get capital letters:
Did I miss anything in this article? Got more? Put ‘em in the comments, y’all:
This ridiculous homophonic error on Yahoo! Shine hit me like a bolt of lightning:
Who the heck makes a mistake like that? The same writer who doesn’t know how to use either the correlative conjunction either…or or the hyphen:
