What can you sell from a bike?

Grab a bike and get peddling! That’s the advice from Yahoo! Travel:

What exactly can you sell — legally — from a bike? And if it’s not a legal substance, you’d better be prepared to get pedaling, because that’s the only way to make time on a bike.

Michael Bay transformed

“Transformers” director Michael Bay gets a little transformation in a big headline on Yahoo! Movies:

How embarrassing. But that’s not the only thing this writer should be red-faced about. By now we know that proofreading isn’t necessarily her forte:

Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if English is her forte. Perhaps she should consider another line of work, like peddling dictionaries door-to-door. She might actually open one and learn the difference between peddle and pedal:

Written by a so-called professional?

Even so-called professional writers make grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes — especially if they work for Yahoo!. Take this example from Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where the writer believes that quotation marks belong after the expression “so-called”:

They don’t. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “Quotation marks are not used to set off descriptions that follow expressions such as so-called and self-styled, which themselves relieve the writer of responsibility for the attribution: his so-called foolproof method (not ‘foolproof method’).”

That’s a common mistake. On Yahoo!, there are a lot of common mistakes, like failing to match a pronoun with its antecedent (the word it refers to). And failing to hyphenate modern-day when it’s used as an adjective, misspelling Flintstones, and best of all using peddles instead of pedals:

This is more akin to a careless error:

And any decent spell-checker would have flagged Minnealpolis as a misspelling:

But for Yahoo!’s so-called journalists, spell-checking is optional. Heck, it’s not just optional, it’s nonexistent.

Just to be sure we understand that Jeff Stone is a Republican state representative, the writer tells us in two slightly different ways, each containing its own errors:

If you think I’m the only person who is appalled by this professional writer’s ignorance, you’d be wrong. Here’s one comment left by a reader:

“using peddles underneath their seats”
“PEDDLES”???? Jeezuz Joe Bob. My 6-year-old can write better than this. Apparently they’re trying to solve the unemployment problem by giving illiterate idiots jobs writing “news” articles. Sheesh.

What was her modus operandi?

Have you ever wondered what is the modus operandi for writers at Yahoo! Shine? Do you wonder how they can get paid for work that isn’t up to the standards of a high school newspaper? What was the writer thinking when she decided that M.O. was the abbreviation for Missouri?

Actually, M.O. isn’t even the abbreviation for modus operandi, which is MO without the periods. If you follow Associated Press style, you use Mo. (and not the postal abbreviation MO) as the abbreviation for Missouri.

Fact-checking also isn’t part of her work habits. I can’t overlook the “lutes slippers,” which were actually called “lotus slippers.” Nor can I ignore the fact that they did not have high heels:

Foot pedals are devices that you operate with your foot, like the pedal on a sewing machine. The writer is actually describing Foot Petals, a trademark of a product that fits into shoes.

So, what was the writer’s MO when composing this? Write anything. Right or wrong. But definitely wrong.

On a bike made of heroes’ awards

Maybe Louis B. Mayer’s father would have been more successful if he had a decent bicycle. It can’t be easy pedaling around on a two-wheeler made from the medals of war heroes:

Or maybe the idiot writer for Yahoo! Movies didn’t know that Mr. Mayer’s father peddled scrap metal.

I’m backpedaling as fast as I can

 I imagine there’ll be some backpedaling by the writer concerning this error on Yahoo! Shine:

Or maybe the man in question was trying to return a broom he bought from an itinerant Fuller Brush salesman.