One of them is probably right

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.

What was the ring made of?

Just what kind of engagement ring was it? What made the genius writer at the Yahoo! front page think that it might float away?

This is the only kind of ring I can think of that might float:

But it’s a really cheesy engagement ring.

Peekaboo boo-boo part two

What dictionary did the writer for the Yahoo! front page use to check the spelling of this?

According to the dictionary you’ll find on Yahoo! (the American Heritage Dictionary), there’s no hyphens in peekaboo. According to the folks at yahoo.com, there are two of them.

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.

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’?

Was it the astronaut or the playwright?

Was the writer for yahoo.com thinking of astronaut Alan Shepard or playwright Sam Shepard when writing this?

The dog breed is German shepherd.

Harassment embarrassment

Any self-respecting writer or editor would be embarrassed to have made this misspelling on the Yahoo! front page:

Someone needs a botany lesson

It’s back to the third grade for a writer for the yahoo.com:

Someone could use a lesson in botany, if only to learn that trees are, in fact, plants.

Do you make this kind of mistakes?

This is the kind of mistake you don’t see often. In fact, I’ve never seen it before:

You can always depend on the writers and editors of the Yahoo! front page to come up with new and inventive expressions that are grammatically incorrect.

Were you hit on the head, too?

Looks like J. A. Happ wasn’t the only one hit on the head. The writer, editor, and proofreader for the Yahoo! front page seem to be suffering from a little cranial damage, too: