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The Engine Room
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A blog about English language use, publishing and the media in general – brought to you by a sub-editor (copy editor) on a weekly UK magazine and his former chief sub.
If you have a question about vocabulary, grammar or punctuation, why not ask
Recent Posts Tagged With 'local newspapers'
Juxtaposition: cocaine deaths / adult cot death
Sarah pointed out this recent Metro front cover to me:The lead headline reads: Cocaine deaths jump by a fifthThe headline above the photo of the teenage girl reads:'Angel' who died in her sleep at 16At first glance, Sarah assumed that the girl had di...
thelondonpap
Gareth emailed in to say:I picked up a free paper on the Tube the other day and was surprised to see it had been rebranded. However I think the new name more accurately reflects its contents - see attached. (Of course, it could always be a really unf...
Credit crunch or recession?
Today's Metro includes the following news headline:Bag snatchesrise as creditcrunch bitesPerhaps someone should let the paper know that 'credit crunch' isn't a synonym for 'recession'.Tellingly, the body copy doesn't mention 'credit crunch' once but ...
What's wrong with cow paté?
So yesterday I read this in English for Journalists (Second Edition), by Wynford Hicks:If your house style includes accents, make sure that you use them consistently. For example 'paté' and 'emigré' are howlers; they should be pâté and émigré.A...
Hot news from South Island
Mrs A and I enjoy a relaxed lifestyle in our seaside retreat, but there's no shortage of blues-and-twos action in the local weekly to keep our pulses racing. These examples were culled from the two latest issues:Firefighters were called to a chimney...
Typo: foul-lane carriageway
Stan from the excellent language blog Sentence first has sent in this scan from the Galway City Tribune, pointing out the typo at the end of the first par (as usual, click on the image to see a larger version):He writes:The road in question is a nice...
Micro-organisms vs micro-organists
Clutchslip forwarded on this amusing screengrab from the thisiscrawley.co.uk website ("brought to you by Crawley News").As ever, click on the image to see a larger, more legible version."Must be a very small church," says Clutchslip.Slightly more ser...
Terry Pratchett and Peach Pie Street
The novelist – and knight – Terry Pratchett is a former sub, and so here at The Engine Room we follow his career with some interest (as regular readers of the blog will already know).On Monday I spotted the following in the Metro free paper (clic...
This year's best April Fool's Day stories
None of the publications I work on ran an April Fool's Day story today, but here are some others I enjoyed:Your Local Guardian: 'Croydon to be renamed in £50m scheme'Guardian.co.uk: 'Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink'Diss Express: ...
Jade Goody still lives
Something topical for a change on The Engine Room. Gareth wrote in this morning with the following:Spotted an interesting headline on the front page of the London Lite last night.The headline, under a big picture of Jade Goody, was "JADE: FEARS JACK ...
Due to the bad weather
A letter in today's thelondonpaper begins:I am very discouraged to see signs up everywhere, both official and unofficial, starting with "Due to the bad weather..." This is as ungrammatical as "Ten items or less", as seen in supermarkets. It doesn't t...
