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Media mistakes

gomezz said:
I know I misread what this was saying but not sure the hyphen makes it totally clear what was meant.
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Without the hyphen it could suggest that CC scientists are responsible for deadly weather. They may be responsible for the hype, but not the deadly weather. I'd have written "Scientists claim deadliest..." Probably too wordy for a headline. If word count a problem then the hyphen seems a reasonable compromise (to me).
 
Instead of the hyphen put "say scientists". The word scientists on its own after the hyphen doesn't really mean anything.
 
Black Hole said:
That's exactly what I was about to say – it's not a hyphen.
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Whether it's supposed to be a hyphen, em-dash or en-dash, chances are it will be the same symbol. I'm lazy and just use the "-" on the keyboard. Sloppily, I referred to a hyphen because gomezz did.
Wildebeest said:
It does seem to be a commonly used shorthand in headlines.
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So much so that I couldn't really see it as a mistake, but I replied anyway.:oops:
 
EEPhil said:
Whether it's supposed to be a hyphen, em-dash or en-dash, chances are it will be the same symbol.
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Sure, but with spaces separating it, it shouldn't be interpreted as a hyphen even if the hyphen glyph has been used in the typography.

A hyphen specifically connects words with prefixes and suffixes. Dashes denote pauses, which may be interpreted (in this case) as a pause and therefore adding a footnote. If a hyphen character is used as a dash, it is a stand-in where the typographer doesn't know, doesn't care, or has no dashes available in his font (see https://hummy.tv/forum/threads/inserting-special-characters-into-forum-posts.11308/)..

But I don't like the way headline writers contract things. I've seen commas used to replace "and" or "or", and it can be unclear which is meant.
 
Black Hole said:
But I don't like the way headline writers contract things. I've seen commas used to replace "and" or "or", and it can be unclear which is meant.
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I agree things can be unclear. Newspapers (paper ones) have limited space and so the headline writers sometimes take liberties. It wouldn't surprise me if they write the headline and story for the print version and just insert it into the online page to keep costs down. (The BBC do that with the red button text leading to half-stories and references to non-existant pictures).

Where would the fun be if we couldn't point out the ambiguity in headlines?
 
Good to know we invented DNA 🤔

And so we've "shockingly" never heard of Jean Purdy - and neither had they until they watched the telly. Don't mention Rosalind Franklin though, do they?

And was Newton's cat really called Spithead, or was that just a typo for what he called it when he tripped over it on the stairs? 🤭
 
EEPhil said:
I don't think it was invented. The mapping of it was.
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Yes, I was being ironic (possibly even sarcastic)! It was a discovery, not an invention.

To be exact shirley they discovered the structure (double helix) rather than a mapping (which implies knowing the pair sequence of a strand).
 
The TBL thing is incorrect in the summary, but they get it right in the article text. It seems some people don't understand there's a difference between the Internet and .www.

But I can see at least three more dubious statements not mentioned above, not including this:–

Found elsewhere on the World Wide Web:
There’s no contemporary evidence that Newton ever owned a cat, and in fact some of his biographers stated explicitly that he never owned any pet in his adult life. (He spent some time on a farm as a boy, but was so day-dreamy and listless that he was deemed unsuitable for agricultural work. His uncle declared that Isaac was “fit for nothin but the versity”, so he was sent off to school.) The earliest known account of the cat-door story was apparently 1827, exactly a hundred years after Newton’s death, and even this source mentions the doubtful authenticity (although claiming that the door of Newton’s lodging at Trinity college actually did contain two cat-sized holes).
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Black Hole said:
It seems some people don't understand there's a difference between the Internet and .www.
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I'm old enough to have used the internet for email, file transfer and the news message boards before www, so it didn't catch me out. (Having said that, I only skimmed the article as it's a sod to read on a small screen. Need to power up the laptop and read it properly!)
 
Cement must be doubtful, after all the Romans are known to have used concrete. If they didn't use cement in it, what did they use?
I thought it was Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre - I may well be wrong though. Did he just manage to commercialise it?
 
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