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.
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.
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:
I was caught off-guard by the lack of a hyphen in the adjective on the Yahoo! front page:
More confusion spawned by the “journalists” at Yahoo! News:
I haven’t a clue what that’s supposed to mean. Easier to decipher is this caption, with the incorrectly capitalized mayor:
and the undercapitalized Constitution:
And a final close-up on a missing hyphen:
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.
When a flying tomato lands, I imagine a “splat” sound. But what sound does it make in flight? That’s the question I’m left with after reading this on Yahoo! Sports‘ “Prep Rally”:
See that, readers? That’s what happens when you neglect to include a comma before the name (or nickname) of the person being addressed. The Flying Tomato is Shaun White, an American professional snowboarder and skateboarder.
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?
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.
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:
