The folks at Yahoo! seem to make the same mistake continually. This time it’s Yahoo! News scribes who can’t tell the difference between continuously and continually:
I wasn’t in the Senate to verify this for myself, but I’m guessin’ that the legislation wasn’t being amended ceaselessly, without stop. But it may have been continually amended.
Ashley Graham is quite the gal. She’s a vocal advocate for body positivity, which seems to be a social movement that’s the opposite of an anti-body. Anyhoo, a Yahoo! Style writer tells us she’s an untiring advocate, an advocate who never stops, not even to eat a bologna sandwich. (Not that I’m suggesting she eats bologna sandwiches. I don’t know. She might be a vegan.)
Her advocacy is continuous, meaning that it is uninterrupted. If she took a break once in a while, then she’d be acting continually.
I wasn’t surprised when I saw that the news editor for Yahoo! Style used the word continuously (which means “without stop or interruption”) instead of continually (which means “recurring frequently”). It’s a common mistake among Yahoo! staffers. I wasn’t surprised when I read the next sentence — I was shocked.
It is beyond my comprehension how anyone — anyone — could make a mistake that profoundly stupid. (Actually the rest of that sentence makes no sense, either. I guess this “news editor” thought Mrs. Cameron would stop wearing clothes from the United Kingdom because it was leaving itself.)
Writers at Yahoo! Style continually make mistakes. And here’s one more:
If the writers and editors never, ever stopped making mistakes, if they made mistakes ceaselessly without interruption, then they would be making mistakes continuously. But even they aren’t that bad. Just bad enough to confuse continuously with continually.
There are only so many little red ellipses that can fit on a single paragraph. And I think I hit the maximum possible with this bit of drivel on Yahoo! Movies:
Where to begin? How about we start with the whole “debuted on silver screen debut”? Nice, huh. But that’s not as bad as “Stage Stuck,” which just sucks. Of course, Christopher Plummer’s most famous role was not “The Sound of Music,” but it was in that musical. I doubt that Mr. Plummer worked continuously, since that would mean he never stopped working. He most likely worked continually. And if he did, what’s the logic behind the “though,” which implies he worked neither continuously nor continually? I don’t have to tell you that the an is wrong (oops, I guess I just did), that front-runner needs a hyphen, and that the movie is “Beginners.”
There’s at least one other mistake in that paragraph, but I didn’t circle it because I ran out of room and red ink.
This is not an auspicious way to start a blog post:
A misspelling (belly dancing is two words) in a headline is just the start of the blunders in the blog post on Yahoo! Shine. There’s the missing word here:
and here, along with the incorrect adverb incredibly and the misused continuously (it should be continually):
But, maybe I’m just being nitpicky. What do you think? Is it petty of me to mention the writer’s inability to count:
I’ll be continually updating Terribly Write, but unlike this claim in the Yahoo! 360 blog, I won’t be doing it continuously:
If you continuously enhance anything, you’d be working uninterruptedly. You’d never, ever stop, not even for a nonfat, sugar-free vanilla latte.
Terribly Write 