I should have stopped reading

I should have just stopped reading after this headline on Yahoo! omg!:

The use of the apostrophe to form a plural was a dead giveaway: The article was going to have a few little, minor, teensy-weensy issues with the language. And it did:

There’s really no excuse for misspelling received, is there? Isn’t a spell-checker standard equipment in any program that can be used for writing? And didn’t we all learn in third grade it’s “I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh“? I guess not.

I have no idea if little North’s car is an exact replica of her father’s car, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t “an exactly replica.”

The writer hopes the speedometer (of presumably the toy car) was modified during the recreation, by which I think she means re-creation, which is the wrong word even with a hyphen.

The author must have been having quite a time (and perhaps some eggnog) when pounding out this article, because she totally screwed up Giuseppe Zanotti’s name, too.

Not exactly picture-perfect headline

The writer for Yahoo! Sports’ “Prep Rally” didn’t pull off a picture-perfect headline for a story about 5-year-olds:

Don Johnson attends premiere of ‘Don Johnson’

Well, hello, Miss Steele.

That’s the way this opening on Yahoo! Movies should have been punctuated if you’re an old-school punctuationist:

That’s not the only punctuation problem in this excerpt: There’s the period outside the quotation marks (in the U.S., it goes before the closing quote) and the missing hyphen in 23-year-old. And while we’re talking errors, how about that extra word in “attended to”? Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith attended the premiere of “Don Johnson.” I wonder if it’s anything like the recently premiered “Don Jon.”

Think a hyphen doesn’t matter?

If you think that a hyphen doesn’t carry much weight in writing, think again. Readers of Yahoo! Shine are treated to real-life proof that the silly little mark can change 18-year-old embryos into 18 one-year-old embryos:

And omitting the hyphen isn’t the only boneheaded mistake the writer made. According to the article, the woman in question used two 19-year-old frozen embryos. But now I quibble.

Go take a Flying Jeep

Is there some law against using punctuation in a headline? Is that why the writer for Yahoo! Sports‘ “Prep Rally” omitted the comma after Dubois and the hyphen in off-road?

Whatever everpresent means to the writer, it means little or nothing to the reader. Maybe he thinks it means “always in existence,” in which case, it certainly doesn’t apply to any automobile. Technically (and grammatically) speaking, who should be used to refer to human beings only and not to some comic strip character with a tail. Wouldn’t it be great if the writer had looked at the picture he included with the article before deciding to call the mascot “Flying Jeeps”?

Perhaps if the writer knew how to pronounce cache (it’s just like cash), he would have chosen a more appropriate word, like cachet (which is pronounced cashay):

I think there’s a word missing here, but I have no idea what it is:

Once in a while a set of errors happens to land in a single paragraph. One of those errors is a subject-verb disagreement and the others involve the spelling of Merrillville:

How droopy is your jaw?

Why is it so difficult for Yahoo!’s writers to spell Comic-Con with a hyphen? It seems easy enough, doesn’t it? But this headline on Yahoo! Movies proves otherwise:

The headline promising five “surprises” and the first paragraph promises seven “favorite things.” So, there’s a bit of confusion, although the writer put the hyphen in Comic-Con — this time:

It was too good to last. Again, the writer dropped a hyphen. Maybe his brain was affected by that drooping jaw:

Does the writer have any other jaw-droppingly dumb things to share? Of course!

No article from Yahoo! Movies would be complete without at least one misspelled celeb name. This time we get two: Bryan Cranston and Chris Hardwick. I’m guessin’ that Mr. Cranston, and not Mr. Harwick (or Hardwick), is  starring in an upcoming film. But that’s not what that sentence tells us. (Oh, by the way, that was the fifth and last “surprise” from Comic-Con. Maybe the headline writer can count.)

Stephanie Meyer is the worst

Don’t you hate it when writers are so confident of their spelling ability that they don’t bother to Google a name? And they spell the name — like Stephenie Meyer — wrong? And if that name is misspelled in a headline on Yahoo! Movies it can show up anywhere including on the home page:

and in the article’s head:

But wait! There’s more! This overly confident (dare I say, arrogant?) writer misspells the name in the article:

The based off of is really off base; the movie is based on the novel. That’s not the worst error and neither is runners ups. They’re just runners-up for worst error. The misspelled Stephenie Meyer is the worst.

A 5-year-old would know better

Even a 5-year-old would know that there’s a hyphen missing from this caption on Yahoo! Shine:

Not a Mensa member?

You don’t have to be brilliant to know that some writers for Yahoo! Shine aren’t exactly geniuses — at least when it comes to trivial parts of their job, like being able to spell and write with accuracy.

Kaiser Permanente is apparently too difficult for this writer to spell — or even just Google:

She seems to think that the word the is part of a family name (it shouldn’t be capitalized) and that only one person in the family has a lawyer (the apostrophe should be after the S):

Ah! There’s that apostrophe again. This time it’s not there to show possession but to create a plural. Which, of course, is wrong:

The Nikolayevs live in California, so it’s a little odd that their son would be moved to a hospital 3,000 miles away in Stamford, Connecticut. You’d think he’d be taken to Stanford Hospital, which is about 2,950 miles closer to home. But a writer who thinks that Child Protectice Services is a real agency, probably thinks Stamford is in California.

So, she’s obviously convinced you can form the plural of a name with an apostrophe and an S, and she has no idea that when you’re referring to Mom, it gets a capital letter (although if she meant “the mom,” it doesn’t).

And smack-dab in the middle of the article is a link, that the writer gets wrong on two counts: a missing hyphen in 5-year-old and the miscapitalized Mensa — an organization for high-IQ folks. I don’t think this writer is a member.

Was that after the invention of oxygen?

You don’t have to be an expert in proofreading to know there’s a word missing in this excerpt from Yahoo! Shine:

You don’t have to be a history expert to know there’s a hyphen missing in Spanish-American War.

You don’t have to be a science expert to know that there’s a screw missing in the writer’s cranium. Radium, like other naturally occurring elements, was not invented. Except maybe by God.