Sorry. “E” not included.

This was an official press release on the White House webpage. The dictionary says to announce is to "make a public and typically formal declaration about a fact, occurrence, or intention; 'he announced his retirement from football.'" Replace "announce" with "reveal" and you get "President Biden will reveal later today that he's nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson." To which you stand up and say, "You revealed it just now!"

You’ve forgotten the “only” rule already? This commercial suggests you don’t eat or sleep. All you do is get one body. Correct: “You get only one body.”

In this one caption, we find at least two goofs, both of which we’ve dealt with in previous segments. First, the awful cliché, “go missing.” You don’t go missing. People discover you are missing. The other mistake is one of apples and oranges. San Francisco is a city. Oregon is a great big state. Which part of Oregon? We don’t know. Maybe, “between San Francisco and the Oregon state line,” or “between San Francisco and central Oregon,” or “between northern California and central Oregon.” Also: “between” indicates “not including.” If you disappear between San Francisco and Honolulu, that means somewhere in the ocean. Not on Nob Hill or Diamondhead. If any of these incidents happened right in San Francisco, or in wherever the other end is, then “between” would be wrong. “From XX to XX” would be correct.

A boat anchor is an inanimate object and takes “that.” A television news anchor is a person and takes “who.”

Does Friday come with fries?

As longtime newspaper folks, the Horribly Wrong team laments that struggling newspapers have had to cut back on proofreaders. It’s possible this publication now is being assembled in another part of the country. But if you are writing headlines for the Fort Myers paper, you should know how to spell Fort Myers.

And we go the video archives for Segment 13: Horror in the boardroom. https://youtu.be/-R3ooeAcsSI

Readers: "Something Went Horribly Wrong" features samples of bad writing we see nearly every day. You can participate! Be our duly deputized “grammar police:” Your motto: “To protect and correct.” Send in your photos of store signs, street signs, newspaper headlines, tweets, and so on. It doesn’t have to be a grammatical error. It can be just what we call “cowardly writing.” Include your name and home town so we properly can credit you. You're free to add a comment, although we reserve the right to edit or omit. Now get out there! Send to Eliot@eliotkleinberg.com

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NOTE: Eliot and Lou Ann are available for speaking engagements, and can travel. Reach us through the comments section. Just think of all of your employees getting back to work on a Monday, their heads filled with all the ways we’ve shown them to be better communicators!