This blog posting represents the views of the author, David Fosberry. Those opinions may change over time. They do not constitute an expert legal or financial opinion.

If you have comments on this blog posting, please email me .

The Opinion Blog is organised by threads, so each post is identified by a thread number ("Major" index) and a post number ("Minor" index). If you want to view the index of blogs, click here to download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Click here to see the whole Opinion Blog.

To view, save, share or refer to a particular blog post, use the link in that post (below/right, where it says "Show only this post").

A Collection Of Bad English.

Posted on 18th July 2022

Show only this post
Show all posts in this thread (Bad English).

I decided to start a new thread for examples of bad English, because there have been such a lot of them lately (and that is not even including those that I saw in Facebook posts).

In this report on NBC News, about a woman waking from a coma after two years and identifying her attacker as her brother, is a quote of Jackson County Sheriff Ross Mellenger: "The keys to the whole thing lay with the victim herself and with her unable to communicate we were left with nothing. Now low and behold two years later and boom, she's awake and able to tell us exactly what happened." I am pretty sure that the statement by the Sheriff was oral, not written, so it is the journalist who doesn't know that the expression is "lo and behold" ("lo" is found fairly often in the Bible). Also, one normally says "The key to ...", not "The keys to ...", although this may be the fault of the Sheriff.

Another example is the headline of this report on CNX Software, which reads "YD-CH32V307VCT6 RISC-V MCU board comes with Ethernet and plenty of I/Os". I/O, which stands for input/output, can be used either as an adjective (e.g. "... has plenty of I/O ports") or as a noun, but as a noun it is non-countable (like air, water, time, money, etc.), so it has no plural (e.g. "... has plenty of I/O"). I would expect a publication that specialises in computer technology to know this.

Then there is this article on Discover Magazine. The "scientist you should know", Carolyn Bertozzi, has coined the word bioorthogonal to describe her field of research, and explains “Orthogonal means not interacting, and bioorthogonal means not interacting with biology,”. No, orthogonal does not mean not interacting, it means perpendicular (at a right-angle). Maybe the headline should read "Scientist You Should Know Not To Listen To: Carolyn Bertozzi ..."

There is also the headline of this report on "19 Forty Five", which reads "The F-22 Is So Stealth It Flew Under an Iranian F-4 Completely Undetected". Leaving aside the fact that the F-22 is a much more modern and advanced aircraft than the F-4 (so outdated that it is no longer flown by western nations - an F-22 should be able to remain largely undetected by an F-4), the word "Stealth" is a noun; if you want to use it as an adjective, you should use the adjective form, "Stealthy".

Finally, there is the headline of this report on "NY Post", which reads "Scientists develop dissolvable implant that can relieve pain without drugs." The word is "soluble"; the author clearly knows this, since he uses it in the body of the article.