Sloppy Copy on TriMet Sign

The ways in which government incompetence manifests are many and that incompetence, too often, reveals itself to the public in the form of sloppy copy on municipal government-issued signage. The latest found example is courtesy of reader Sean Patrick, who snapped the below photo as the TriMet MAX train he was riding pulled into the Gateway Transit Center in Portland, Oregon.

In his e-mail message, Patrick wrote that the mistake was on a sign "on the door to where the operator sits to drive the train" and "it caught my eye." It caught his eye because the S tacked onto the last word of the sign's second line resulted in the usage of the wrong tense of the verb "to vandalize." The copy should just read vandalize, sans the S on the end. In the second paragraph, the sign writers, editors and makers managed to use "vandalizes" properly, but that by no means negates the mistake above it.

TriMet's offering a cool $1,000 reward to people who report the assault of TriMet workers or vandalism of TriMet property to the transportation agency. Too bad for the Proofreader and Sean Patrick that there's not a similar cash reward up for grabs to those who report the assault and vandalism of the English language on government-issued signage.

The Proofreader thanks Sean Patrick for submitting the mistake.

Errors Aplenty In Times Baseball Column

Summer. The weather heats up (or warms up, this year), the days are longer, the overall pace of life slows down a little and people take all kinds of measures to maximize their enjoyment of the season. Often, those measures involve a vacation of one type or another. For many, the vacations are all mental. Good, old-fashioned escapism. Perhaps this explains the recent lapses over at The New York Times, because it seems like whatever Times employees have been editing and proofreading the Op-Extra "Heading Home" column have been on a protracted mental vacation. Come on, Times H.R. department--give these people a real vacation so they can refresh, recharge and return to form! The mistakes lately have been silly and elementary.

The first one, an instance of bad HTML, happened in a column published nearly a month ago titled "Fehr's Game." Interestingly, this isn't the first time "Heading Home" has been plagued by bad HTML. As you can see above, in the second-to-last paragraph of the column's first page, the word "all" appeared printed with HTML tags intended to make the word appear italicized. This one was corrected rather quickly, but was unable to elude the Proofreader.


Next, as you can see above, yesterday's installment of the column contained a spelling error that was probably caused by a typo. The writer was looking for the word "choose," but ended up typing the past tense "chose," which turned out to also be the wrong tense.

These mistakes are a shame, because they mar what is an otherwise great column that gives readers a unique perspective of a real MLB player's view of baseball and the world. There's no excuse for these silly blunders that only distract from the fine content. Hopefully, a vacation is in order for the editors and proofreaders in question. Everyone needs vacations, even proofreaders. Check that. Especially proofreaders!

Tense Confusion on N.Y. Local Newscast

During its 11 p.m. broadcast on Saturday, January 17th, Eyewitness News, which can be seen on the ABC owned and operated Channel 7 in New York City, printed a mistake in its lower-third chyron during a report on the fighting between Israel and Hamas. As you can see, highlighted in the screen shot below, Eyewitness News writers and editors became confused with the tense of the verb "to continue."


Rather than "continues," Eyewitness News should've used the word "continue" before the word "fighting," which, as you can see in this conjugation of the verb, is the indicative future tense. No, verb conjugation wasn't interesting in grade school and it's definitely not interesting now. However, professional news writers and editors should demonstrate a working knowledge of it at all times.

Wait, isn't there another mistake in the the lower-third copy? Shouldn't "ceasefire" actually be hypehenated? Not necessarily; it's a style issue. If, like the Proofreader, you're a stickler for accuracy and style, then you'd consult The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, where, on page 61, you'd see "cease-fire" is the preferred style of Times editors, so that would have been a safe choice for Eyewitness News in that situation. Not hyphenating cease-fire is a variant but accepted form of the word, so there's no infraction there. Also, judging by the amount of space in the lower-third, writers and editors may have used the variant form because it was a better fit. However, there was no excuse for using the incorrect tense of "continue." That's a mistake that simply shouldn't have been made.