Look what she’s thrown up!

I almost threw up when I saw what the senior features editor for Yahoo! Shine has thrown up on the site:

The royal mistreatment

If you think you know something about a subject that you’re paid to write about, just go ahead and write! Don’t bother checking your facts. You know them! That seems to be the philosophy of the Yahoo! Shine writer who tackled the subject of the royal family’s photos on photo-sharing site Flickr.

Obviously she assumed monarchy and queen were proper nouns because they’re about royals and royals are special:

While there is a limited number of words in the article, there seems to be an unlimited number of mistakes. By the time Lady Diana Spencer was a royal, she was Princess Di. But who cares!? Not the writer. (She also doesn’t care about punctuation, adding an arbitrary hyphen after brightly.) And what does it matter what you call the queen? Queen Elizabeth is a queen and a mum, so let’s just call her Queen Mum, even though that title is reserved for a widow whose child is the reigning monarch. That title belonged to her late mother, but what the heck!

Queen Elizabeth is a ruler; her daughter and nieces are not. (Another punctuation problem: The apostrophe is in the wrong place. It should be used to signal the omission of the 19, and not to form a plural.) I have no idea who the “Wales’ famed women” could be. The Wales were Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and their children. By my count, that’s one woman. But let’s call all the women of the royal family Wales.

Even a royal waistline shouldn’t be divided with a hyphen, and queen is still a common noun.

Again, maybe she really meant Princess Di? But royal titles seem to allude the writer, so she’s free to call the late Princess of Wales anything she wants. (Again she misplaces an apostrophe.)

Hilarious! Good idea to inject a little humor in this miserable piece. I love the whole thrown/throne thing; it’s befitting the rest of the article:

An oversized queen gets another capital letter:

A missing word here and the strange apostrophes around gams are an interesting touch by a writer clearly out of touch with English:

No, no, no:

Titles like queen and first lady get capital letters only when they precede a name. (Although Associated Press style wouldn’t capitalize the latter under any circumstances.) But this writer knows nothing about the subjects of British royalty and English. But that doesn’t stop her! Good job! Way to carry on without being hindered by actual knowledge!