The Times, September 12, 2017

Let’s leave aside the clueless intro (do you really think an application to knock down and rebuild a three-storey terrace house to incorporate a massive basement is ever going to be ‘mundane’ or ‘straightforward’?) and turn to the use of the word ‘can’. This means something is possible with or without permission, while ‘may’ implies permission. So ‘the boy can pick apples’, which means the boy is physically capable of picking apples, is not the same as ‘the boy may pick apples’, which means the boy is allowed to pick apples. In this case the owner can demolish the house (with help) if she wishes, but she has obtained permission, so the required word is ‘may’, not ‘can’. I would expect the Times staff to know this, but I am constantly disappointed.

 

Sunday Times, September 10, 2017

What on earth has Tunisia got to do with it? Turns out to be some complex dispute which could not possibly be explained in the space, so it would have been better not to mention it. Old subs’ maxim: If in doubt, leave it out.

The eye of Hurricane Irma has hit Florida’s southern islands as a category four storm, forecasters say.

BBC News Online, September 10, 2017

This suggests that the eye of a hurricane is the most severe part, but it is the opposite – a small window of calm air in the centre of the circulating high wind, so it doesn’t ‘hit’ anywhere. It is the hurricane itself which is causing trouble. And isn’t it a bit strange to have ‘forecasters’ telling us what has already happened? ‘Meteorologists’ or ‘weathermen’ would be better.

Eye of Irma HITS Florida

Mail Online, September 10, 2017

See above.

Four people killed as eye of Irma SLAMS into Florida

Mail Online, September 10, 2017

See above, and note that four people were killed, not four giraffes.

Sunday Times, September 10, 2017

Restaurant critics just can’t resist showing off, can they? If only they didn’t always make themselves look foolish.

This is how the authoritative Decanter website describes wine en primeur:

 

Sunday Times, September 10, 2017

There is a word for ‘100-year anniversary’: centenary.

Four walk free from plane crash in Greater Manchester

BBC News Online, September 9, 2017

If you must use a cliche, at least make it the right one. ‘Walk free’ is often (much too often) used when criminals avoid a jail sentence. I presume the overworked expression wanted here was ‘walk away’.

The Times, September 9, 2017

You cannot rely on promotions departments to be accurate about punctuation, spelling or grammar, which why house ads must always be checked to avoid howlers like this making the paper look silly.

The Times, September 9, 2017

Is there a human brain involved here? If you are previewing a black-and-white film, it is simply stupid to illustrate it with a colour picture.

All these cuttings come from the Daily Telegraph dated September 5, 2017

Of course this should be ‘let the cat out of the bag’. It is clumsy to give some words in a heading the definite article and not others, and here there was plenty of space to make it ‘the Duchess’.

‘Pin’ stands for personal identification number, so this is saying ‘personal identification number numbers’. I think the best way to handle this is to keep PIN all in caps (despite the usual advice that if the initials make a word, such as Nato, you use caps and lower case). This would give you ‘PINs’ as a plural, rather than ‘Pins’.

The word ‘too’ should be ‘either’. The correct spelling of ‘alright’ is ‘all right’, notwithstanding the TV programme It’ll Be Alright on the Night or the Who’s track The Kids are Alright. These are both wrong. It is fascinating to see that this story was deemed worthy of the efforts of the Chief Political Correspondent. It might have been better to disguise the fact that this was his work by putting Daily Telegraph Reporter.

Here we have a typically lazy, knee-jerk caption on a snake – as anyone who has handled one knows, they are not in the least slippery, but rather rough and dry. The use of the pluperfect ‘had been’ is wrong: the caption is not describing an event that happened before the story, so the past tense ‘was’ is correct. It must be obvious that it came from a ‘local’ address, but why should it be a family pet? Do single people not have pets? It would have been better to use ‘neighbour’.

What a strange order to put things in. The couple married and had a dog? And the children are not mentioned until the last par?

I would have said:

In 1948 she married Ralph Eichhorn, a gastroenterologist. They had two children.

I would have left out the dog altogether.

The painter Leonardo da Vinci should be referred to as Leonardo if you are not giving the full title, because ‘da Vinci’ simply means ‘from Vinci’, his home town. It is not a surname. Obviously Dan Brown did not know this when he wrote The Da Vinci Code.

i newspaper, September 6, 2017: Page One

The first requirement of a front-page puff, or indeed any headline, is that the words are in the right order. You can’t just chuck them in at random to fit the space. In any case, the puff should be designed to fit the words. I would suggest:

Chocolate
enters the
fourth
dimension

and use a picture to suit.