Front page SMH:
Why Gladys could not be premier
If the Transport Minister had of put her hand up, it would have led to outright war.
I’m surprised it wasn’t “would of led to outright war”.
Quote-mangling: Benjamin Franklin
There’s a great article in TechCrunch about the mangling of a Benjamin Franklin quote. As always, a product of laziness, lack of fact-checking and an inability to place an historical situation (or quote) in its context (and instead mindlessly applying it to a modern context).
Mighty fails
SMH front page, top left spot (aka pole position):
A cracking 150-plus partnership between David Warner and Alex Doolan has put the visitors in a dominate position on day 3 in South Africa.
Looks like the inability to distinguish between “predominant” and “predominate” has spread. Continue Reading →
Sports manglish
I initially thought the following clumsy paragraph was a simple sub-editor’s mistake in the SMH. However, on re-reading, it seems to have been intentional:
The following evening as his younger brother Mitch watched their 28-year-old sister Melissa play her final home match in her top-level basketball career Shaun was an absentee, by virtue of notification the South Africa tour duty that had been called off for him was suddenly back on, and that he needed to pack and get to the airport for a 11.45pm flight from Perth to Johannesburg.
Brain hurt. But wait; there’s more. Continue Reading →
Malapropisms
Great article in the SMH. The best one surely has to be:
You might hear this described as something that you’ve got to “nip it in the butt”. This one’s quite a funny one when you hear it being said incorrectly. What you should be trying to do is “nip it in the bud”.
Twiggy
Just months before the original Mac debuted 30 years ago, it was deeply troubled by an in-house 5.25″ flimsy floppy-disk drive it relied on called the Twiggy (you know, for it’s flimsiness)
I hope that was said tongue-in-cheek. See: skinny British model famous in the 60s. (Not to mention the misuse of “it’s”).
What is it about sports journalism?
There is something about sports journalism: mixed metaphors; poor use of words; clumsy sentence construction; lack of clarity; and just manglish in general.
This article in the SMH suffers from a number of those problems. (How did it get through the subbies in its current form? The imminence of Australia day?) Continue Reading →
The SMH … sigh
What is it about using commas for pauses, but not to separate dependent clauses…
Unsurprisingly, African countries with their high rates of malnourishment and lack of access to clean water and affordable produce, populated the top 10 worst countries to eat in.
… including when they are clearly needed?
The all-rounder dubbed the Big Show by teammates threatened his best production yet, hauling Australia back from 4-114 after the exit of Shaun Marsh (55) into what was looking by the minute a match-turning knock.
That article has a pearler even by the standards of sports journalism:
The ball after reverse-pulling Bresnan for another boundary a slightly more conventional pull brought him unstuck, ending up in the hands of Ravi Bopara at midwicket.
So the ball reverse-pulled Bresnan? Sigh…
And, of course, no sports article would be complete without a failure to recognise the existence of the collective singular:
Australia lead the series 2-0 heading into Sunday’s third match in Sydney.
“It is claws”?
Sugar: It’s claws are everywhere
What is so hard about learning to use the word “it’s”?
Coups
Surely they mean coups d’etat?
As coup d’etats go, they don’t come much more problematic, risky or challenging than this one.
Update: error has been silently fixed.