What do you call …

a store for food and sorcery equipment? A gorcery store! At least that’s what I think this headline on Yahoo! Shine refers to:

Not so fast!

Either Rupert Murdoch got the fastest divorce in history, or the writer for Yahoo! Shine doesn’t know the meaning of “ex.” Considering that Mr. Murdoch announced his intention to divorce his wife last week, I’m thinking it’s the latter.

At least they spelled Hillary Clinton correctly

There’s not much to positive to say about this article on Yahoo! Shine. But I give the writer props for spelling Hillary Clinton’s name correctly. But I gotta take off points for the expression “in that time” when it doesn’t refer to an actual time period. (The writer meant “since that time.”)

Any professional writer should know that the idiom is not “baited breath,” unless it involves earthworms. The idiom is “bated breath,” meaning “reduced or lessened breath” or a state of almost stopping breathing as a result of a strong emotion like fear.

No shots to the head here, and no headshots, which is what the writer meant:

I don’t believe it was Ms. Clinton’s BlackBerry that went viral, but a picture of her with a BlackBerry.

Twitter followers are usually of the human type:

Don’t you wonder if someone has people followers, what other kind of followers they also have? I know I do.

Too stubborn?

Was the Yahoo! Shine editor too stubborn to use spell-check or a dictionary when she wrote this?

Yahoo! staffers continue to amaze me with their new and inventive ways of abusing the English language. That’s one misspelling I’ve never seen before. Here’s a hint to the writer: If you can’t pronounce a word correctly, don’t try to spell it phonetically.

Kate Moss and Playboy

Kate Moss is posing as a playboy. Or posing for Playboy. Or posing with a playboy. Heck, I don’t know what she’s doing. And neither does the editor for Yahoo! Shine:

Don’t let the facts stand in your way

Those folks at Yahoo! Shine certainly have their priorities straight: Don’t worry about the facts, just get the article pushed out. So, when you read this headline, you might think that the Duchess of Cambridge attended a coronation because, well, that’s what it says:

She didn’t. She attended a ceremony for the anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

Of course, it’s normal for us regular folks to notice that the Shine writers are also above using punctuation:

… except when they use it incorrectly:

Again with the coronation! Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was not even born when the queen was crowned:

When she’s not screwing up facts and punctuation, she’s adding an extraneous word and using the wrong word:

But wait! There’s more! There’s the randomly capitalized duchess and the contraction it’s where the possessive pronoun its should be:

Just because the facts are wrong, the words are wrong, the punctuation is wrong, don’t judge.

Do you proofread what you wrote?

Do you check what you’ve written after you’ve published it? If so, you’re doing better than the editors at Yahoo! Shine, who obviously didn’t bother to verify that the HTML commands to italicize a title are correct:

What are the odds!?

What are the odds that a woman would marry a man with the same last name as hers? According to Yahoo! Shine, it happened when Jane Dreyfus (whose maiden name is Conrad) married Pete Conrad:

That might be unusual. What’s not unusual is that a Yahoo! writer would misuse a word. Jane Dreyfus’ maiden name is DuBose; she married Pete Conrad and after their divorce she married someone whose last name is Dreyfus.

The word née is from the French feminine past participle of the verb naître, which means “to be born.” It’s used to indicate the maiden name of a married woman.

Because I know better

The writer for Yahoo! Shine seems to think she knows how to punctuate Governors Ball, so she adds an apostrophe where she thinks it belongs:

Nice try. But wrong. The event is the Governors Ball Music Festival.

The most surprising writing mistake

The most surprising thing about headlines on Yahoo! Shine is that they include typos and misspellings that would be found by any spell-checker — if the writer had bothered to use one: