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.”

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.

Something’s afoot and it’s not good

It’s not the worst typo a writer can make, but it’s an easy one to spot if you’re writing about Ray Halbritter:

Maybe the writer needs some assistance in the proofreading department:

And editor who knows that either is singular and it’s is the contraction for it has would certainly help:

But something is afoot at Yahoo! Sports‘ “Prep Rally”: There’s no proofreader or editor at hand.

What was the name of that movie?

It’s one of the simplest rules of punctuation, and yet one of the most frequently ignored by the writers and editors at Yahoo!. This time the offense appears on the Yahoo! front page, where millions of people can point and laugh:

The rule is simple: A question mark goes before a closing quotation mark if it is part of the quoted matter. In this case, it’s not. The title of the movie is not “Bling Ring?” The entire phrase is the question: Real-life ‘Bling Ring’?

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:

Your mother would be so proud

So, you finally landed a job writing for a big, hot-shot Internet company. Your mother must be so proud to see what you’re producing for Yahoo! Shine! Unless, of course, she’s like my mother. In that case she’d be appalled to see that you don’t know compliment from complement and that you think pharaoh is a proper noun:

She’d be mortified to think that you put an apostrophe in the plural Kardashians:

She’d be ashamed to realize that you didn’t bother to research Wilson Phillips and Chynna Phillips — just so you got the spelling right:

If your mother is like mine, she’d be grateful that you have a job — and that this article doesn’t have a byline.

Would that be the 1920s?

Keeping up with the times and spotting fashion trends? That’s not exactly what the editors at Yahoo! Shine are doing right now. They’re nearly a century late with advice on how to dress for work in the 1920s:

That’s pretty much the dumbest use of an apostrophe that I’ve ever seen. The apostrophe indicates the omission of a letter (or two) or a digit (or two). In this case, I’m guessing the only thing missing here is the writer’s knowledge of punctuation.

So, it’s really NOT Abercrombie & Fitch?

Do the editors for Yahoo! Shine know something we don’t? Is Abercrombie & Fitch really not the name of the apparel store?

Those little quotation marks really threw me. Maybe they indicate that the caption refers to a movie or a book or a TV show, and not a store. Or maybe I’ve been wrong all these years. Next time I’m in “Barnes & Noble” I’ll have to buy a grammar book.

How many principals are there?

As far as I know, schools have only one principal. If that’s true, why did the writer for Yahoo! Shine imply that a school in Virginia has more than one principal?

I guess if there are two principals, and they sit in the principals’ office, one of them must be the principal principal.