“Journalism”–offering employment opportunities to the subliterate.
In addition to the obvious reason, this Foxnews article chaps my buns because the author (and editor?) got paid for spouting this kind of gibberish:
Will someone please buy a copy of “English for Dummies” for the author of that monstrosity? (In case the site changes it w/o a transparent acknowledgement of the error(s), I’ll just post a screencap, hmm? CLICK to embiggen)
Would someone like to diagram that sentence for me?
The screencap enlarges ‘underneath’ your Acquire this trbute and Fairtax sidebars in Firefox (Will look in IE) but I get the gist. My pet hate is people in the UK who say “We are going to have to try and..”. It is “Try TO…”.
If you look at the sentence are replace the word allow with prevent then it is OK!!
Interesting, Colin. The image popup works fine in IE and Opera but pops under in FoodFax (Firefox) and “Rust” (Chrome) as you noted. Since I’m generally happiest with Opera’s page rendering around the interwebs and least impressed, in general, with Internet Exploder’s, this leaves me feeling a bit befuddled. *heh*
Side note: When I “CTRL+Scrollwheel Up” to magnify the page in “Rust” then CLICK to “embiggen” (if that’s not a word, it ought to be :-)), the image pops up properly. *shrugs* Haven’t tried that in FoodFax.
Also interesting is that the typos you mention fall into two different classes:
[1] “tibute” is what an be casually referred to as a “light stroke” typo. You probably just touched the “r” key lighter than your computer could register. That’s a mechanical typo.
[2] “Are” for “and” is a different class: two very common words typed with a similar frequency; muscle memory slips one in for the other.
The sentence I gripe about in the post falls into no class of typo. It’s most likely the result of poor editing, where the sentence was written and then one portion was re-written without editing the whole thing. I’ve done that, but I’ve also never felt it was excusable for me to do so, even though I don’t get paid to wordsmith and normally write only for casual commentary, such as in this blog, on FB or other casual fora. Folks who accept a paycheck and yet engage in this sort of butchering of English should be beaten with dangling participles to within an inch of their lives. *heh*
I now feel bad because my last comment had some typos. [1] tribute [2] for sentence are, read sentence and. Duh.
I now feel a lot better. I didn’t know that there were ‘kinds’ of typo! I frequently type ‘you’ instead of ‘your’ and ‘string’ instead of ‘strong’ but would baulk against setting MS Word’s auto-correct pick them up!
As a musician I have been guilty of many piano typos over the years in performance. LOL!
“Piano typos”. I’ll have to adopt that term. Years ago I applied “clam” to such things from a jazz band milieu where “blowing a clam” referred to any sour note. Thinking of “piano typos” I can see where each of the classes of typo mentioned here could easily have a place, along with “quick slips” that simply miss or hit adjacent keys, etc.