Leaving Your Spelling Skills in San Francisco

Here's another installment of my ongoing (and probably useless) series lamenting the decline of accurate grammar and spelling in our age of information downpour, especially on the Internet.

With this particular error, The Oregonian won't be able to keep the grammarians of San Francisco, um, at bay:

Top story on The Oregonian's website (Oct. 23, 2011)

It's sad, too, because Portland and San Francisco have so much in common: progressive politics, proximity to the Pacific Ocean and high vegans-per-capita statistics (based purely on observational and anecdotal data). For now, it looks like the two West Coast cities don't 'C' eye to eye.

Who knows? Maybe we'll soon see a story about "Portlin" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Almost as Bad as the Dodgers' Season Itself

The Dodgers found their way into the news cycle for all the wrong reasons this season: the unthinkable Bryan Stow beating, the divorce saga of Frank and Jamie McCourt, the seemingly fitting bankruptcy proceedings, the slumping attendance, the overall on-field mediocrity (see: watching the playoffs from home).

Now, when the Dodgers finally have something to celebrate, the Los Angeles Times botches its online coverage with a grammatical nightmare in the subhead (below). You're killing me, Smalls!

British News Scandal Surrounds Inanimate Object

Or at least that's what the front page of the Los Angeles Times website led me to believe Wednesday night with this shocking headline:

Was a hearing aid embezzling money? Was a first aid kit making unethical phone calls? This could be an interesting read! Oh, wait -- it's about an aide? Why didn't you say so?

It appears that the writer of this online headline, not David Cameron, needs the aide. Then again, I guess they invented alternative spellings for a reason.

So Many Bad Grammar, So Few Time

News flash: Grammar is going the way of the, uh, newspaper.

In an age of information when speed trumps accuracy, it's no surprise to see unforgivable errors in sentence construction, spelling and punctuation across the media landscape. But while many of these gaffes are probably the results of innocent typos, some of them suggest a more pervasive trend of linguistic ineptitude in places where English proficiency should be expected.

For instance, there was a story Wednesday morning about bombings in Mumbai that zoomed into the lead space on the Los Angeles Times website. It was grave news, especially for a city that is no stranger to terrorist attacks. However, it was hard to ignore the glaring mistake in the headline:

"Series," as the headline writer surely knows, is the subject of the headline, rendering incorrect the usage of "kill" in this case. Of course, there is a scenario in which the above headline would be correct; indeed, if there had been multiple series of blasts, "kill" would be appropriate. (After all, the word "series" is the same as a singular or plural noun.) But a quick scanning of the story made it clear that Mumbai had endured one set of blasts, not more, and that the subject-verb agreement was out of sorts.

Essentially the same mistake was seen the following day in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at UC Berkeley. Alas, the frustration that should have been directed at the news of another hefty tuition increase was instead pointed at an avoidable grammatical error:

Now, the Daily Cal is an excellent publication. It even has a copy blog of its own. And hey, everyone makes mistakes. But what made this particular blunder so outrageous was the fact that the grammatically correct version of the same headline could be found a few inches below the gaffe in the breaking-news banner. Hermes does not approve.