Daily Express, August 2, 2017
This purports to be a quote from J B Morton, the legendary writer of the Express’s Beachcomber column for 50 years. I would be amazed if he was ignorant enough to put ‘Bosch’, which is the name of a German electrical goods firm and a 16th century Dutch artist, and a Second World War nickname for the Germans, instead of ‘Bosh’, meaning rubbish.
All these cuttings are from the paper dated August 3, 2017
‘Forward advance’ is a tautology, which means saying the same thing in different words. The definition of advance is to move forward. This writer liked it enough to use it twice.
The i prides itself on not making a fuss about royalty, but it should still get titles right. The former Sophie Rhys-Jones is the wife of the Earl of Wessex and as such she is a countess. A duchess is the wife of a duke, for example the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Duke is a senior rank to earl.
Instead of the stuff about the cloth manufacturers of old, it would be more interesting to say that the building has been turned into shops, offices and cafes, and that the restoration took three years. You do not need the word ‘first’ before ‘opened’, because ‘opened’ means ‘first used’.
This is an example of a misused comma. It makes the word ‘who’ relate to the subject in the first part of the sentence, ie the son of the earl. Without the comma, the ‘who’ relates to the last-mentioned person, ie the earl. You should also lose the second comma. In the last paragraph a couple of words seem to be missing. Who was he ordered to pay? And should it be a ‘lump sum’?
How many medium, large or giant molecules are there? A molecule by definition is tiny.
Daily Express, August 1, 2017
It’s a common mistake to treat a ‘plural’ name like a plural noun in terms of apostrophes. Even though ‘Charles’ ends in ‘s’, it is singular and takes an apostrophe and another ‘s’, making Charles’s. In the same way it would be ‘Mr Jones’s house’.
i newspaper, August 1, 2017
(45 words) This terrible heading, with the awful ‘get to’ and a failed attempt to be clever, shows complete lack of understanding of the story. The point is that the bears will no longer be protected, and could be hunted. How is this ‘more freedom’?
The story is bad too. Starting with ‘The US government’ is one of the sure-fire ways to make readers move straight to another story. And what does it matter which set of officials deals with the bears? This is how I would do it:
Grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region of the US are losing their protected status because numbers have climbed to 700 from fewer than 150 in 1973, and a hunting season will probably be introduced. Conservation groups are planning to appeal against the government ruling. (44 words)
The Times, August 1, 2017
This is from the Times diary column, TMS, which is currently using a different obscure word every day. So funny! Presumably this jolly jape left no time to check the spelling of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.