Maybe a repeated word or two on the home page of Yahoo Lifestyle isn’t the worst mistake one could make:
It’s just the most obvious, and one easily caught by a proofreader, editor, or anyone familiar with English. But on the same page, there’s a little problem with the order of words:
Maybe that isn’t such a big deal; it’s just another mistake that should have been eliminated before it made it into our consciences.
Gosh, I feel really stupid. All my life I’ve thought that lyrics were the words of a song. According to Yahoo Lifestyle, word and lyrics are two totally different things:
OK, I’ll also admit I don’t know what the writer meant by the word word. Was the writer referring to Mr. Petty’s promise (as in “he kept his word”) or to actual words (as in “lyrics of a song”)? I’m so confused.
If you’re a writer, editor, blogger, or just someone interested in writing in excruciatingly correct English, you might have occasion to refer to a style guide. A style guide can be an internal company document or a public publication, like the Associated Press Stylebook. Many media companies use the AP guide as the definitive source of spelling, capitalization, word choice, and the like. But not Yahoo News, apparently.
According to AP style, cabinet should be capitalized when referring to the president’s advisers, and not to a piece of furniture. (Other authorities, such as the Government Printing Office and the New York Times, recommend capitalizing the word in that context.) But ultimately it’s a matter of house style. So, I’ll give that one a pass.
Not getting a pass? The use of him instead of the reflexive pronoun himself. (When the subject and the pronoun refer to the same person, use a reflexive pronoun, which ends with self or selves.) And obviously, the doubled and in and and.
Well, do you think that the editor for Yahoo Style knows what palatial means? I think not, otherwise we wouldn’t be subjected to this headline:
Readers of Style noticed the redundancy, too, and didn’t hesitate to point it out:
Did you really just write “palatial palaces”? Do you work for the Department of Redundancy Department?
Today’s Alibaba meeting kicked off today, according to Yahoo! Finance:
Makes sense to me. Who’d want to kick off today’s meeting tomorrow?
It looks like the writer for Yahoo! Style was so impressed by the front of Megyn Kelly’s dress that she wrote about it twice:
Yes, a resemblance is usually a similar resemblance, and we have the genius writer at Yahoo! Style to tell us that:
What she hasn’t told us is the meaning of jig-jagged. Did she make up that word? Yes. What she calls jig-jagged lines looks like zigzag lines to me.
It’s time to go, to go. You’re just two words too many on the Yahoo! front page:
If this was meant to honor Stevie Nicks and I were the singer, I’d say “no thanks, Yahoo! Style.”
I’m not impressed by a writer who doesn’t know how to hyphenate 66-year-old. Who doesn’t care about repeated words. And who is too lazy to look up the actual name of Ms. Nicks’ song. (It’s “Rhiannon.”) Apparently the writer thinks flapper and goth are worthy of capital letters, but honor isn’t worth a spell-check.
This is not an honor. It’s an insult to the subject and to the readers.
This mess on the Yahoo! front page is much like others, except there’s more of it:
Somebody thought that Nationals needs an apostrophe to show that it was the Nationals’ exit, but somebody thought it doesn’t. Somebody thought that repeating a word is OK; the rest of the world thinks it isn’t. And somebody thought that much like 2012 was the same as much like in 2012, but it isn’t.
Terribly Write 