One day’s worth of errors

I couldn’t possibly address one day’s worth of errors found on the Yahoo! front page. I couldn’t handle just two hours’ worth of typos. There are just too many mistakes on Yahoo!, including this missing apostrophe:

I’m not sure what “33 years’ worth of taxes” is. I guess it’s the same as “33 years of tax returns.” Anyhoo, the writer omitted the apostrophe in what the Associated Press calls a quasi possessive. Other similar constructions that you’re likely to encounter:

• two weeks’ vacation
• three years’ experience
• his money’s worth

About the about the about the

I have one thing to say about the about the about the on Yahoo! Celebrity: Proofread!

Fans watch out

I’m probably one of the few grammar fans who always watch out for mismatched subject-verb pairs. It stems from childhood when my friends and I would each pick a subject and then try to find the correct verb. I would have been thrilled to read this on Yahoo! Sports, with its mismatch of subject (fans) and verb (which should be watch) and where instead of when:

Barack Obama: Forgotten already?

He’s been in office for more than six years, but it seems that the writers at Yahoo! Makers have already forgotten how to spell Barack Obama’s name:

Nitpicnicking

I admit it: Sometimes I’m just really nitpicky. I read a sentence like this one on Yahoo! Makers and say (sometimes out loud): What the heck does the writer mean?

Is she saying that sitting down at a dinner table (as opposed to preparing that dinner) requires no thought, but a “picnic situation” (which I presume is different from a picnic) requires thought and planning? I don’t get the comparison. I also don’t get why logisics and differnt passed through the spell-checker unchecked. Oh, yeah, I forgot: Yahoo! writers don’t use spell-checkers.   They also don’t believe in proofreading for missing words. But I quibble.

And and I don’t understand how a writer can misspell separately, since separate appears on every list of the 100 most commonly misspelled words. Shouldn’t a professional writer know that?

Is it nitpicky to expect that a writer would know that picnicing, if it were a real word, would be pronounced pick-nice-ing?

In order to maintain the hard C sound at the end of picnic, the writer should have added a K: picnicking. But I pick nits.

Where can you find C-suit executives?

Have you heard of C-suite executives? They’re the men and women at the C-level of a corporation: chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operations officer and others. What do they wear? C-suits? That’s a new term just coined by a Yahoo! Finance writer, though I suspect she inadvertently dropped a letter:

I do not think it means what you think it means

Mysterious words have proliferated throughout Yahoo! Style as a result of one writer’s ignorance of basic English:

I do not think proliferated means what she thinks it means. She probably thinks it means infiltrated. It does not.

Tennis skirt, anyone?

It wouldn’t be a proper Yahoo! Style article without an incorrect word changing the meaning of a sentence:

Each with her own mistakes

Yahoo! Style publishes articles by several women, each with her own style and her own interpretation of English grammar.

At least one gal thinks it’s OK to use a plural pronoun (like, oh, say, their) to refer to a woman. It’s not. The correct pronoun is her.

Prime ministers on the English channel?

Huh? I have no idea what prime ministers (AKA premiers) on a channel have to do with Caitlyn Jenner. Those editors at Yahoo! Style always manage to confuse me:

I think I’ll just give up trying to figure out what that means. I’m going to watch a little TV. Maybe I’ll catch Ms. Jenner’s show, which premieres on the E! network.