Floating "the"

Duh.

Canada's population in a millenium

I don't normally look for factual errors, but this one was too egregious to ignore.

Another version of this Canadian Press story has the figure 2031, which is far more plausible than a population projection that's a thousand and twenty years into the future!

Period as a paragraph

Maybe it's for emphasis?!



The more frightening incident?

This probably should have read "... the most frightening incident he'd experienced...."

 

$1.75 cents

This probably means one dollar and seventy-five cents, not one and three-quarter cents.

Sentence ends with ,.

Shift gears with the cluth

They deicded what?

As an added bonus, "wouldn't" and "didn't" are missing apostrophes.



Alsipping market share

"Slipping" was probably the intended word.

Toddler "survies" tragedy

It's clear from the article itself that "survives" was the intended word.

Woffstock?

The dog festival in question in called Woofstock (obviously).

Jaz-Z?

Maybe they were thinking of the Indian bhangra rapper Jazzy B.

Wearing headphone?

Pouring or poring?

Although "pouring" evokes a much cooler mental picture, "poring" is the correct word for this usage.

Amount of users?

I read this headline and thought the word "amount" might not be right, but wasn't sure why.

One of my favourite English usage websites confirmed my suspicion.  The headline should have used "number" (or "proportion", as used in the article itself) instead of "amount", since Twitter users are countable.

What are "would-tenants"?

This was probably intended to read "would-be tenants".

Have you every considered suicide?

The text of the SMS being described is not in quotation marks, so we can't blame teenagers' lackadaisical attitude towards proper English for this one.

Mismatched headline

Kyle Turris is a hockey player.

Photo fail

Not a spelling or grammatical error, but irresistibly hilarious.

Extended family

Maybe it's a sports thing I'm not familiar with, but I would have thought this is a team photo, not a family photo.

Swearing of mirrors

An error this egregious in an otherwise well-written article makes me think article's author couldn't have been responsible for this.

What's a cityace?

Maybe an amanglemation of city and place.  (Hey, if the Star can make up words, so can I!)

Mussles?

Muscles are anatomical; mussels are molluscs; mussles are non-existent.

Uncapitalized name

Unless he's trying to be the next e.e. cummings, Mark Weisleder's first name should be capitalized.

Save trouble later?

Linguistic economy is the hallmark of good writing but the Star goes too far here.  We can figure out they mean "can save [you] from trouble later", but this caption could equally be interpreted as "can save trouble for later".

Ellipsis oops

Here, an ellipsis (colloquially, "dot-dot-dot") is used to indicate the omitted last half of a sentence in a quotation.

Today's word-processing software and web browsers are perfectly capable of generating and displaying a tight, single-unit, unbroken and unbreakable ellipsis.

Since the Star instead used clumsy-looking periods and spaces, it was forced to insert an additional space after the ellipsis and before the sentence-ending period.  But that space should have been a "non-breaking space" to avoid awkward results like this one.

Special guest: hit the breaks!

The Globe and Mail isn't immune to making misteaks either.

When engineers attack

Even though the intended meaning is obvious, ambiguous sentences like this one slow down the reader.  Why not avoid double-takes by wording it as "Gadhafi's family home had been designed by West German engineers to withstand massive attack[s]."

 

The six kilometre area

I have a little sympathy for this mistake because traditional units of area are difficult to visualize (what's a hectare anyway?).  However, describing an area in linear units is just plain wrong.

Commas gone wild

There shouldn't be a comma in "Sheppard Ave., W."

Also, the comma after "Sheppard Ave., W." is a serial comma (also known as a Harvard comma or Oxford comma), which the Star normally does not use (including further down in the same article).

The "possible tornado"

Presumably, the Star didn't want to definitively state that the event was a tornado yet.  But a "possible tornado" can't cause widespread damage and injuries.  It would have been better to say "...after a storm, possibly a tornado, ripped through the town...".

Councilor or councillor?

Although the Star might retort that it prefers the US spelling of "councilor" (which would be odd, for a Canadian newspaper), the subject of this article was a member of the municipal council of the City of Toronto, which uses the title "councillor".

Comma-free paragraph

The first sentence needs a comma or two, and large numbers should have commas (or spaces) separating thousands to make them more readable.

Dissention or dissension?

Ascent : ascension
Dissent : ?

Breech or breach?

Breech: 1. (noun) The opening in the rear of the barrel of a gun where bullets can be loaded; the part of a cannon behind the bore; the back part of a rifle or gun barrel. 2. (verb) Dress (a boy) in breeches after he has been in petticoats since birth. 3. (noun) The lower rear portion of the human trunk; the buttocks.  4. (noun) A breech presentation or delivery; a fetus in breech presentation.

Breach:  1. (noun) A failure to follow a law or rule.  2. A failure to do something that you have promised to do or that people expect you to do.  3. A situation in which someone does something that goes against accepted rules of social behavior.  4. A serious disagreement.  5. A space made in a wall, fence, or line of defense, especially during a military attack.  6. (verb) To break a law, rule, or agreement.  7. To get through something such as a wall or fence.
 

Rare special guest: NYTimes

It doesn't happen often, but I spotted an error in the New York Times today -- but they fixed it before I could capture it!

When I first read this article on my Blackberry, the photo caption stated "Supporters of the detained Indian rights activist Anna Hazare shout slogans during a rally in her support in Mumbai on Tuesday."

Anna Hazare is a man.  But by the time I ran back to my computer, they had already fixed the error. 

I see a lot of errors in photo captions.  I don't know much about the newspaper editing process, but I get the impression that photo captions are not written by the same person that writes the article. 

Car and "dirver"

Whoops.

Parallel formatting fail

Not really a grammatical error, but shouldn't the second heading be bolded like the others?

Better late than never

This probably should have been "later".

Obtained how?

EHealth or eHealth?

According to the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), "brand names or names of companies that are spelled with a lowercase initial letter followed by a capital letter (eBay, iPod, iPhone, etc.) need not be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence".

Recession or rescission?

I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the class action is alleging rescission (unwinding a contract), not recession. 

Mystery question marks

???

In other news...

Since starting this blog in a fit of frustration, I looked around to see what else is out there on the internet about this topic.  Here's a selection of some of interesting stuff I found.

Regret the Error
This blog chronicles errors published by news media around the world.

The Star acknowledges that it's not perfect
A Star editor writes about mistakes published in the Star and readers' reactions in this piece published in the Star in 2010.

Disgruntled Star editor edits memo from publisher.  From 2009, Torontoist.com blogs about an about-to-be outsourced Toronto Star editor showing the publisher why it still needs in-house editors.

A fair "trail"

At least they got it right once in the sentence.

Adrenaline, not adrenalin

This common misspelling is tempting because it seems more phonetically correct, but this hormone from the adrenal gland (which is also known as epinephrine) should have an "e" at the end.

No period after "km"

The International System of Units (SI) dictates there is never a period after an SI symbol for units (unless it's at the end of a sentence).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Writing_unit_symbols_and_the_values_of_quantities

Plead, pleaded or pled?

To be fair, there's some debate around whether the past tense of the verb plead is "pleaded" or "pled" (the former is more commonly used in legal circles).  However, it's probably not "plead", and it definitely can't be two different conjugations in the same article!

"AIDs" is not a disease

"AIDS" is not a pluralization of "AID"; it's an acronym for "acquired immune deficiency syndrome".