It’s not a couple of errors on the Yahoo! front page; it’s one error and it involves a missing word:
As the American Heritage Dictionary notes:
The of in the phrase a couple of is often dropped in speech, but this omission is usually considered a mistake. In 2013, 80 percent of the Usage Panel found the sentence A couple friends came over to watch the game to be unacceptable.
I admit it: Sometimes I’m just really nitpicky. I read a sentence like this one on Yahoo! Makers and say (sometimes out loud): What the heck does the writer mean?
Is she saying that sitting down at a dinner table (as opposed to preparing that dinner) requires no thought, but a “picnic situation” (which I presume is different from a picnic) requires thought and planning? I don’t get the comparison. I also don’t get why logisics and differnt passed through the spell-checker unchecked. Oh, yeah, I forgot: Yahoo! writers don’t use spell-checkers. They also don’t believe in proofreading for missing words. But I quibble.
And and I don’t understand how a writer can misspell separately, since separate appears on every list of the 100 most commonly misspelled words. Shouldn’t a professional writer know that?
Is it nitpicky to expect that a writer would know that picnicing, if it were a real word, would be pronounced pick-nice-ing?
In order to maintain the hard C sound at the end of picnic, the writer should have added a K: picnicking. But I pick nits.
I know one person who didn’t bother searching for Ariana Grande, and that person works at yahoo.com:
Here’s a really odd oddsmaker from the Yahoo! front page:
That’s not the only oddity in that module: The sentence below it seems really odd, too.
Seeing a misspelling on the Yahoo! front page, one of the most visited pages on the Internet, does not soothe my nerves. It has just the opposite effect:
With the number, frequency, and severity of errors that are made every day on the Yahoo! front page, I can’t believe the Internet giant doesn’t receive an avalanche of emails protesting its embarrassing use of English:
How embarrassing for Yahoo! TV. Here on its home page is a little more of Graham Elliot than is necessary:
Take a deep breath. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stay calm, this misspelling on Yahoo! DIY may pass:
It’s so cute when the writers for Yahoo! try to pound out words or names that include accent marks. It’s cute, and usually wrong. Today, it’s Renée Zellweger’s name that has a misplaced acute accent on Yahoo! Celebrity:
That’s not Aaron Rodgers on the Yahoo! front page, but it should be:
Yesterday, it was a misspelled Roethlisberger. Today, it’s a misspelled Rodgers. Why do yahoo.com writers have a problem with quarterbacks?
Terribly Write 