Either the 5-year-old is quite a prodigy or the paper could use a new copy editor.

"He was a ‘happy lad’ who adored his family and five-year-old son, who was interested in cars and had studied mechanics at college in Bilston"

The copy editor thinks he's a child progeny.

Sometimes when I write fast, I write sentences like that. Editing is so important, isn't it?

Speaking of editing, I was reviewing one of our publications today, and one of our editors changed the "me" to "I." Shouldn't it be "me?"

"I would say one of the major differences for both my wife and me is that we are living in an enormous city for the first time."

It should. This kind of hypercorrection happens when someone assumes that a common correction in some contexts should be applied in all contexts.

But this was an editor!

Obviously not any good, though.

Read the sentence without"my wife" to see which word is required.

To me, the "I" doesn't even sound right. I had been an editor as well; it wasn't my original writing. But I made them change it back to "me," from editor #1's change to "I."

Life can be so complicated!

And another. This one's a cracker!

Tributes have flooded in for a ‘larger than life’ musician Trevor T, who played sessions with iconic reggae band Musical Youth after he passed away on Sunday.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
But this was an editor!

That editor would not be much help for I.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
And another. This one's a cracker!

Tributes have flooded in for a ‘larger than life’ musician Trevor T, who played sessions with iconic reggae band Musical Youth after he passed away on Sunday.

. On the harp, I assume.

Nah, Gabriel lent him his horn.

quote:

Tributes have flooded in for a ‘larger than life’ musician Trevor T, who played sessions with iconic reggae band Musical Youth after he passed away on Sunday.

Now, that is a "cracker," as you British say. Was this printed somewhere? I wonder where those copy editors were...probably too interested in looking for prepositions that end a sentence.

I think these are from the online version of Bob's local paper. You'd have to go to Bilston to find out if the printed version had the same phrases. I think that often web versions tend to cut out the proof readers more often in the interests of speed. There's usually not the same rush with the paper version, which might even come out weekly. On the other hand, it's much easier to make corrections.

quote:

Tributes have flooded in for a ‘larger than life’ musician Trevor T, who played sessions with iconic reggae band Musical Youth after he passed away on Sunday.

That may just be a fugitive comma missing after the end of the dependent clause.

You are probably right, arnie.

That reminds me of a survey we sent out recently. It seemed as though we had proofed it nine ways from Sunday (and I've never figured out where that phrase came from), though clearly we had not, and spell check wouldn't catch the mistake we made:

"What do you consider the prose and cons of..."? Our only hope was people thinking, "I didn't know the plural of pros was prose."

This is from a different local paper...


"Jailed police officer who made fake terror 999 call is sacked by force"


Am I the only one picturing a rather violent dismissal?

Or put in a bag and tossed in the river.

This came up on a FB feed - from one of those websites about dumping Hillary Clinton: "Hillary is a trader..." Sometimes the ignorance on the website amazes me.