Yes, I get that "Petraeus" isn't that easy to spell -- all those vowels! -- but this guy's name is all over the news right now, so it wouldn't hurt to, you know, check that sort of thing. Maybe the writer was thinking of Harry Potter's patronus? Not that anyone would want, as their protective energy animal, a former CIA director who cheated on his wife and had to resign in disgrace. Just a guess.
From the Atlantic Wire:
From NY1's weather report:
According to Webster's, there is no such word as "yeat."
Urban Dictionary, however, yields a different story. "Yeat" is defined first as a word that residents of Newburyport, Massachusetts, used to shout from one ship to another to identify themselves. It can be used to mean "yes" or even "no"; it is also supposed to be the first word of the slang phrase "yeat the bun," which is not defined, so I have zero idea what it means. (My tentative stab at it: "Boy, he really yeat the bun on that one.")
Then there is this sample conversation
John: Yeat!
Mark: Yes, yeat indeed. And how are you doing this fine day?
John: Yeat.
Mark: Ah, not too well. Do you want to go help me do chores?
John: Yeat to that!
Mark: Ah, so you'd rather not. How about the movies.
John: YEAT!
Mark: Great, let's go.
Oh, now you're just talking nonsense. It sounds like John is either touched in the head (see: Hodor in Game of Thrones: "Hodor!") or else bound and gagged, only able to make the sound "yeat!" in desperate response, meaning, "Help! I'm bound and gagged -- set me free, you idiot!"
In any yeat, this hottest day of the yeat has me scared to go outyeat, so I am staying inside to yeat my yeat even though I have no yeat in the yeat.
Doesn't MSNBC.com have copyeditors? Probably not. As budgets for content shrink, copyeditors are considered expendable. In fact, sadly enough, many editors don't even know what a real copyeditor is or does.
From a recent MSNBC article on the bus monitor who was bullied:
So which is it, MSNBC? Klein or Kline? Maybe we should throw a third spelling in there, just for fun. How about "Kleyne"?
For the record, her name is spelled "Klein." I'm puzzled at how someone could write this article and misspell her name four times, while also spelling her name correctly, once in a while. But then perhaps I'm the rare person who's bugged by this kind of thing.
As for the video itself -- which you can watch at the link above -- I finally saw it this morning, and I could only get through two minutes of it, stopping well before what I hear are the worst parts. Cringe-inducing and horrible; it gave me flashbacks to both riding the bus and being teased at school, though I hesitate to say "bullied," because I never got anything remotely close to this. I know the kids have apologized, but I hope they feel genuinely bad and ashamed of their behavior. More than that, I hope their parents do.
I am going to start posting typos and other linguistic errors I find around the web on this blog. Because it's easy, and it amuses me. Also, I just got back from California last night, and I can't sleep. I slept great when I was in California -- bless the suburbs for their dark, peaceful quiet and spacious bedrooms -- but here I am back in New York and back on the Ambien, which I hope is only temporary. (The Ambien, that is. New York's got its hooks in me. I just wish it were quieter, darker, and had bigger bedrooms.)
I'd never watched a Gordon Ramsay show before yesterday, but I caught an episode of "Master Chef" on the plane, and then tonight was the next new episode, so I watched that because nothing else was on. Ah, summer: the period of time when there's no good TV, which should free me up to do actual work and productive things, but somehow it doesn't.
Well, dang blast it if my pristinely empty DVR might now have to be filled up with this show, because I find myself rooting for that blind chick to win it all. Christine Ha, one of the cooking contestants, is blind -- not blind as in "she's blind to the ways of the world" or "blinded by love" or even "blind" as I call myself because I need glasses to see three inches in front of me. She literally can't see. And somehow or other she manages to keep cooking great food, even when she had to cook a live crab that was snapping at her hands and bit her finger without her being able to stop it. Or when she put an apple pie in the oven and had to take it out without knowing what the crust looked like.
A likable reality show contestant is a rare thing, but even the other contestants on the show are supporting and applauding this woman, though eventually she may have to stop it with the crying. (In this case, however, the tears are somewhat understandable.) There was also one douchebag of a contestant who, having won an advantage in an earlier challenge, picked a live crab for her knowing it would cause problems, with her inability to see and all. But the joke was on him, because she won the challenge with a bright-looking crab ceviche. I hope she makes up t-shirts that read, "Ha, I can cook" or or "Ha, how you like them apples?" or just "Ha HA, douchebag."
Anyway, I went looking for some bio information on her, and this is what I found:
Fist blind? Am I a perv (don't answer that) for thinking that's some kind of sexual reference? Maybe she was blinded because someone punched her with a fist? Or is "fist blind" a term for the loss of ability to see your fist? "I'm sorry! I can't give you that fist-bump, I'm fist-blind!"
Click on the article itself, and you'll see that the word has been corrected to "first." Booooring.