Who stitched this together?

Whoever stitched together this sentence for Yahoo! Sports did a pretty good job, if you ignore the misspelling and the missing hyphen in the compound adjective gruesome-looking:

Laying it out in black and white

Let’s lay this out in black and white for the Yahoo! Celebrity writer: If you don’t know that fiancé is an engaged man (and fiancée is an engaged woman), perhaps you should refer to the man as betrothed. Or maybe boyfriend:

If you’re using it as an adjective, then black-and-white gets two hyphens. (As a noun, it doesn’t need those hyphens.)

So, Jessica Simpson posted a black-and-white photo on Instagram. Is it any surprise that it looked like she was wearing a black and white dress? (I really don’t know how the writer could tell what color the dress was.) Repeating a word isn’t the worst mistake a writer can make, but claiming she “was laid out” makes it sound like the poor woman was prepared for a funeral, not a wedding:

Finally, the writer alleges that her hand was “placed seductively over her eyebrow.” Unless her eyebrow is somewhere on the top of her head, I think the writer made a misstatement:

A case of hyphen death

Grammar nerds are always bemoaning the death of the apostrophe. It seems that no one knows when to use one. But the misuse and abuse of the apostrophe pales in comparison to the treatment of the noble hyphen. And nowhere is that treatment worse than on the Yahoo! front page.

The writer manages to get one hyphen correct, but neglects to include the second:

Omitting a hyphen (or two) in an age is one of the top three hyphen errors you’ll find on Yahoo!.

Just as bad as omitting a hyphen is including one where it’s not necessary, like here:

Oops. Here’s another case of a missing hyphen:

The hyphen is needed to join 38 and pound in a compound adjective. Let’s not overlook the missing apostrophe! It’s needed to indicate the contraction of let us: let’s.

I’ll give you a profanity-laced tirade

Maybe there’s a broken key on the yahoo.com writer’s keyboard — the key that would turn “profanity laced” into a compound adjective that modifies “tirade”:

That key would be a hyphen, which is used to join two words that individually can’t modify a noun.

A matter of hyphen death

The hyphen is suffering from a slow and painful death at the keyboards of the writers for the Yahoo! front page. Those folks have no idea when to use the little character, placing it after an adverb ending in LY:

That’s just wrong. The LY ending is the signal to the reader that the word is an adverb and therefore modifies the word that follows it.

Then there’s the case of the hyphens between a number and an abbreviated unit of measurement, which is wrong, too:

Hey, maybe they can take one of those hyphens and put it in record-setting?

It’s not possible to agree

Is it possible for two writers or editors to work together and come up with a single way to spell a word or punctuate a compound modifier? Not if those two folks work for the Yahoo! front page:

Really? Someone (or some two) can’t spell work-from-home with hyphens twice on the same page? Really?

Little-known fact about typos

It’s a little-known fact, but typos destroy the credibility of a website. Grammatical errors don’t help, either.

Right about now, Yahoo! Shine doesn’t have much credibility with me.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters

Not much to see here on Yahoo! Movies. Just some problems involving a movie title: It’s “Godzilla, King of the Monsters.” And  some problems in what should be 24-hour period:

Still having trouble with health care

It’s still a problem on the Yahoo! front page: How to spell health care when it’s used as a compound modifier. In the past, the folks working for the Internet giant have called it health care, health-care, and even healthcare. But the editors still can’t make up their mind:

How hard is it to make a decision and stick to it? Apparently too hard for Yahoo! staffers.

Health care: Who should decide?

There’s a decision to be made by the editors at Yahoo!. It seems that the folks who write for the Yahoo! home page like to hyphenate health-care when it’s used as a compound modifier:

Except when they don’t hyphenate it, even when it’s a compound adjective:

The reporter for Yahoo! News‘ “The Lookout” prefers healthcare:

But someone else on Yahoo! News likes the two-word option:

Healthcare? Health care? Health-care? Hey, Yahoo!, just pick one and go with it. Using all three just makes your writers and editors look incompetent.