Monday, April 9, 2012

Some howlers...

I blogged about coconuts purchased from a supermarket some days back.

Now, a FairPrice supermarket outlet has committed a howler -- it displayed a sign that tried to abbreviate the word "coconut" but ended up with something else! I am NOT putting the offending pic here, but you can click on this link to mrbrown's blog entry (Sunday, 8 April) to see it:

http://www.mrbrown.com/

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This is either a howler (do we need to know that she's a virgin?) or a mischievous headline writer's little joke. You need to find a way to make it clear that you are referring to Virgin Airlines here. Or just start off with "Airline staff...":


We know what the blurb writer is trying to say below, but using "hug" as such here makes it ludicrous. It would be better to write the blurb as "Mum dies as she shields her son from impact":



As for captions, if you've got "stranded" mannequins in the picture, say so, or you'll get this howler:


This car ad thought it was being clever by touting a certain model as being "light years ahead". Don't be fooled; a light year is a measure (unit) of distance, not of time!...


Finally, I doubt if many people spotted this howler:



At first, I thought this ad was classy, deploying a clever play on words. But reading the seminar outline above, I could see that the advertiser was dead serious that there IS a bull run. Just calling it "bull" in the header and not "bull run" changes a technical term into a derisive idiom (based on the bull's excrement). So, don't give me that bull!

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