Yikes! Someone working on the Yahoo! front page needs a lesson on grammar, specifically how to match a verb with its subject:
The subject of that sentence is plural (pad and shirt) and the verb should be are. Good grammar and proofreading are all you need.
A typo can be the result of a slip of the finger. A careless mistake everyone makes. Let’s just say this mismatched subject and verb on Yahoo! News‘ “The Ticket” is a typo and not the result of a grammatically impaired scribe:
This typo is just an extra letter, but when that letter is an S and it comes at the end of a word, it can leave readers bewildered, befuddled, or bemused. Was it one report that says that Gov. Romney’s plan supports illegal immigrants? Or do multiple reports say that, because that could be a whole lot worse for the former governor. I’m confused, but not motivated enough to read the article. If the writer makes a mistake in the headline, how can I trust the story below it?
When a well-known person passes away, the Web is awash with tributes. In a departure, the senior feature editor for Yahoo! Shine has written something of a tribute to the women in Steve Jobs’ life. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a grab bag of errors that’s more insulting than inspiring.
Mr. Jobs has been described as a private person and a brilliant egoist. Who knew that his wife Laurene shared those traits?
We all know that the writer made a mistake by placing that phrase before Laurene. But what can you expect from a writer who doesn’t know that Buddhist is a proper noun and the compound modifier billion-dollar needs a hyphen?
Mr. Jobs’ birth mother was a graduate student:
He was an 11-year-old:
Maybe this writer should just forget trying to use punctuation. She should just stick to using letters, numbers, and the Space bar, because she has no clue where to stick those little commas and apostrophes. And maybe she just ought to stick with writing in the present tense, because the past tense of some verbs (like forbid) alludes her (it’s forbade):
How many children did Mr. Jobs’ birth parents have? At least three, if you can believe this writer. There was Steve, his sister, and another sister:
(The fact is, his birth parents had another child, a daughter.) It looks like Piper is starting to take my advice and omit punctuation. She’s dropped a comma and the quotation marks around the book title. Good start!
Oops. She’s fallen back on her old ways and included an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong:
and a comma where it has no business being:
There’s more problems with her use of the Shift key when it comes to Zen Buddhist and Stanford business school. (Only the full name of the school, Stanford Graduate School of Business should be capitalized.) Readers can’t overlook the mismatch of program and foster (which should be fosters):
It’s meant to be some sort of tribute to the women in Steve Jobs’ life, but it’s really a tribute to carelessness and grammatical ignorance.
We’ve had enough with the attacks on English by the writers at Yahoo! Shine! We readers demand that someone over in Sunnyvale, Calif., crack the grammatical whip and enforce the rules of the language:
A friend of the editor’s would point out that this should be “teammate of Emmitt Smith‘s” on the Yahoo! front page:
The rule about so-called double possessives is that you should use the possessive for the word after of if the word refers to a person or other living thing AND if the word before of refers to one of several. Emmitt Smith is a person and he had more than one college teammate. So, the correct expression is “teammate of Emmitt Smith’s.”
Help! I’m running out of red ink! There are so many errors in this article on Yahoo! Shine that my computer and my brain can’t handle them all. It starts with the first sentence, where a dangling participle indicates that the stars of TV were growing up:
I guess that could happen, but it would make more sense if it were the viewer growing up watching TV stars. I’m just sayin’.
Ugh. Did this writer really watch TV, or is she just making stuff up? Mallory wasn’t the middle sister on “Family Ties”; she was the middle child in a family with one son and two daughters. And she wore Fair Isle sweaters and laid-back styles:
There’s a hyphen missing in close-up:
There’s something missing here and I don’t mean just words. It’s accuracy: Denise Huxtable was part of the Huxtable clan. Kinda makes sense, doesn’t it?
The character played by Farrah Fawcett was Jill Munroe, not what the writer alleges here:
I don’t know why the writer had to tell us that something (was it blouses, dresses, or something called blouses dresses?) was “pastel colored” and not simply “pastel”:
Poof! I wish there were a magic way to get rid of the errors. What the hell is a “guys-guys”? It makes no sense to me. Holy crap, there’s another error!
No, no, no. There are no hyphens in the verbs “mixed and matched.” There just aren’t. And adding them is kinda kitschy:
I think the writer has confused the character Mary Richards with the actress who plays her, Mary Tyler Moore. Kinda a careless (or worse) error:
If a gal is from the southeastern portion of the States, she’s a Southern belle, with a capital S:
Whew! I think I need to go Office Depot and buy some more ink. Just in case this writer decides to inflict another article on the reading public.
If you can’t be right, at least be consistent. That seems to be the motto of the writer of this article on Yahoo! Shine:
For some reason, the writer has capitalized grand jury, not once but three times. I guess that makes it all okey-dokey. The writer (whose name I won’t reveal) also uses the wrong homophone here:
and an incorrect singular verb here:
Let’s not sidestep the issue, there’s no hyphen in sidestep:
The writer for Yahoo! TV‘s “Primetime in No Time” seems to think the song by The Capitols was actually a question:
But he doesn’t stop with just a misplaced question mark. There’s the missing cap in Tom DeLay, the incorrect verb was (which should be were), and the over-hyphenated overqualified:
But other than that, it’s all cool.
Someone over at Yahoo! Shine could use a little help with some basic language skills. Like how to write the past tense of a regular verb:
Here’s a hint: Just add a D to the verb if it ends in E. While we’re talking elementary-school grammar, let’s not overlook the incorrect capitalization of president (it gets a cap only when preceding the actual name of a president). The word judgement, though not technically wrong, is a variant of the standard judgment, which is generally the preferred spelling. A couple of hyphens would come in handy in “high- and low-end items.” Just a suggestion.
Have you ever treated yourself to a good book on verb tenses? If not, I suggest you do:
It should have been a big red flag. I should have known that a Yahoo! Shine article with this headline would not go well:
And I was right. After the opening paragraph, I was unable to read any farther:
I don’t know if the writer is pro- or anti-English, but I do know she doesn’t know when to use the suspensive hyphen. I suspect she thinks that unrightfully is a real word and that Miss California, Carrie Prejean, doesn’t care how you spell her name.
As for the rest of the errors? If I really cared, I might opine that the writer meant “alone, paired with” or maybe “along with” or perhaps “paired with.” Whatever. Whatever the writer meant, I’m guessing that the verb are should be is. But who knows? Not me. And I suspect, not the writer.
Terribly Write 