Dear CNET: Hire a proofreader

[yendi]

This is on the main CNET News page right now:

Comments

[emilytheslayer.livejournal.com]

Is it the rogue apostrophe or is there something I'm missing?

[yendi]

The rogue apostrophe.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

When I read it, I thought it stood for "has," so...

[wednesday]

That just reads British, though.

"Well, the maker's gone and shaken up the world, eh? Brilliant."

[amokk]

Look, we had to add an S to this word, so we put an apostrophe in. That's the grammar sign for "holy shit, look out, we added an S to this word! Holy shit oncoming Ses!"

[yendi]

If they'd gone with "shaken," I might buy that. Although then I'd also say that they've got a poorly-trained writer (present tense is the preferred way to go here, with past tense an occasionally acceptable alternative). But I'm also inclined to apply Occam's razor here and assume that the simpler and more common act of stupidity is what took place.

[yendi]

Then the problem would be with verb tenses instead of apostrophes, I suppose.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

I do actually think it's a tense problem; someone who wrote down exactly what popped into his/her head and didn't check it at all. (For one thing, "XBox 360 makers"--plural--doesn't really make any sense.)

Either way, too hasty, not enough thinking.

[dragontdc.livejournal.com]

Here in the South it seems every s is apostrophic by default. But then, we've gone to such great lengths to institutionalize our ignorance perhaps anything less than an apostrophe on every pluralization would seem as if we were not holding up our end.

[kizlj.livejournal.com]

I had a tense agreement running on the cnnmoney page for about five hours this morning. Proofreaders were the first against the wall when the layoffs came.

[tablesaw]

My guess is that at one point there was a word or word missing, as in "The Xbox 360 maker's press conference shook up the video game world . . ." During a change, a substitute was never put back in.

It's more likely that an American business site would always use singular for companies, and that the apostrophe was meant to be a possessive for an object that never came, rather than a pluralization.

[jerel.livejournal.com]

LOL. Sad but true.

If I had a nickel for every rogue apostrophe I saw around here, I could have retired four years ago.