Sharply reduced

Somebody at yahoo.com sharply reduced sharply and not surprisingly, no one caught the mistake:

8-year-old becomes youngest man alive

How did an 8-year-old become the youngest man alive? By appearing in a headline on Yahoo! Shine:

That don’t look right. Somebody made a boo-boo: Either the 8-year-old was a boy or there’s a digit missing in the man’s age.

How can you miss that?

How did the editor for Yahoo! Shine overlook the missing question mark in this headline?

Where did it go? Here, at the end of an imperative sentence:

Do you mean the department store?

Dillard’s is a department store chain in the U.S. Did it go on a honeymoon with Jill Duggar? Maybe the Yahoo! Shine writer responsible for this headline can tell us:

Which what?

Huh? I’m not even going to try to explain this headline from Yahoo! Shine:

I don’t even want to think about it

I’m focusing on the misspelling of Shailene Woodley’s name and the smashed up crime stopper so that I don’t have to think about what this headline means:

Thanks, Yahoo! Shine, this is going to give me nightmares.

Agree to disagree

It looks like the writers/editors over at Yahoo! Shine have agreed to disagree. They can’t seem to agree on the spelling of a word here:

and here:

For the record, the American Heritage Dictionary declares mug shot (two words) as the correct spelling. Now maybe we can see if the writers can agree on what to call the guy in the mug shot.

This is a sorry excuse for writing

I’m sorry to say it, but it’s hard to believe that this article from Yahoo! Shine was produced by a professional writer. Heck, it’s hard to believe it was written by a middle school graduate.

There are a few minor problems, like needlessly capitalizing a word. “Sorry” doesn’t get a capital letter unless it’s at the start of a sentence or you’re writing about the board game:

This is a sorry attempt at making a possessive out of women:

(To form the possessive of a plural noun not ending in S, just add an apostrophe and S: women’s, men’s, children’s.)

Things get a little sorrier with an error-filled paragraph, which includes a subject-verb mismatch (the subject study takes the verb has identified):

A “verbal tick” sounds like a talking, bloodsucking arachnid. If the writer meant an idiosyncratic and habitual behavior, that would be a tic. Then there’s the issue of the pronoun they, which has no antecedent. Just who is they? The rest of the sentence is just a mess. If you’re still reading that article at this point, I feel sorry for you.

How many fashion shows?

If you believe what you read on Yahoo! Shine, then you’d think that Burberry and designer Tom Ford had a joint fashion show in London:

Well, that’s a lie. They didn’t join up in London. The fashion show that the author refers to is strictly a Burberry affair. I have no idea why the writer dragged Mr. Ford into the mix. Just like I have no idea why she dragged a hyphen into this adverb and adjective mix:

Or why she dragged an apostrophe into this plural:

Perhaps she was confused about the location of the apostrophe (does it go before or after the S?), so she put it before and after the S, even though it doesn’t belong in 1990s:

Were the “mall rats” buying droves of hats? It’s kinda hard to picture that since droves means “a large mass of people.”

Arousing suspicion

I suspect that the writers and/or editors over at Yahoo! Shine haven’t been trained in the wonder that is punctuation. If they had been, they’d know enough not to put the question mark here:

The question mark belongs after the closing quotation mark because the entire sentence is a question.

I suspect the writer didn’t look up the spelling of Lil’ Kim; if she had, she’d know there’s an apostrophe missing here:

So, when the writers aren’t dropping punctuation marks, they’re adding them where they don’t belong, like here:

The word is postpartum, without a hyphen.

And my favorite mistake, arousing my suspicion that no one at Yahoo! cares about spelling, is this misspelling: