If it’s really cold where you live, the weather might be called wintry. Except on yahoo.com, where it’s wintery:
In the U.S., the preferred pronunciation is with two syllables and the preferred spelling is wintry. Choosing an uncommon spelling of a word is not as bad as two to‘s, which I find too, too funny.
It must have been a stressful weekend over at the editor’s desk at yahoo.com. Maybe that’s why the editors missed the missing apostrophe here:
Or failed to recognize that schoolyard is one word:
Someone should demand to know why a typo like this slipped through the spell-checker:
(Oh, yeah. I forgot. Yahoo editors don’t use spell-checkers. Or proofreaders.)
No spell-checker would have caught this perfectly spelled bit of nonsense:
I have no idea what that was supposed to be. Can anyone translate it for me?
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.
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.
I’m not surprised anymore when I see that writers for Yahoo! Style have no idea how to make a possessive out of a plural noun. It happens nearly every day:
So, the writer and editor didn’t know that athletes’s makes no sense (they should have written athletes’). What surprises me is the fact that they thought they needed to make it clear that it was physical bodies, and not imaginary bodies, that are the focus of “microagressions” (they should have written microaggressions).
What are the odds that someone at yahoo.com proofread this headline? Zero.
This appears to be a teaser from website written by an amateur author tapping at a keyboard in his mother’s basement:
It is actually from yahoo.com, which allegedly employs professional writers and editors. (But apparently no proofreaders.)
Spotted yesterday on yahoo.com:
What’s the issue? It’s the use of off of, which some think is wrong and others say merely lacks concision.
The American Heritage Dictionary says:
The compound preposition off of is generally regarded as informal and is best avoided in formal speech and writing: He stepped off (not off of) the platform.
While Merriam Webster states:
The of is often criticized as superfluous, a comment that is irrelevant because off of is an idiom. It is much more common in speech than in edited writing and is more common in American English than in British.
Aha! There’s the reason for the superfluous of! I’m reading yahoo.com, which isn’t exactly “edited writing.”
This might just be a new record for number of errors in a single sentence:
It’s unimaginable to me (and to most English speakers) how the writer could think that sentence is okie-dokie for publication. She didn’t notice that prices starts is a grammatical horror? Or that prices can start at $700 and also go up to $1500. But there’s only one starting price for any item. And prices … is sold? That one made me spit out my sugar-free, nonfat vanilla latte. That’s so bad, I almost didn’t notice the random and totally unnecessary at.
I was going to ask Google for simultaneous translation of this caption from Yahoo! Style, but I’m rethinking that decision. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what the writer was saying:
Terribly Write 