The Grammar Vandal

On the cover of a magazine

September 12, 2007 · 8 Comments

I was directed to this Sports Illustrated cover by faithful reader Lee. He has a Ph.D.

Check it out:

I’m feeling the urge to make a dumb jock joke, even though most of my athletic friends are quite intelligent as well.

It should be all-time, not alltime. It’s the cover! It’s huge! It’s creamy white against a background of so many colors!

Hire an editor.

Thanks, Lee.

Categories: Grammar Errors · Journalism · Reader-Submitted Errors · Sports

8 responses so far ↓

  • Ryan // September 12, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    They should have just gone with “Ultimate Upset.”

  • Narges // September 13, 2007 at 2:20 am

    I am not saying that this is the case here, but a lot of papers and/or magazines do have their own rules on words that could be spelled multiple ways.

  • dlipkin // September 13, 2007 at 2:43 am

    What Narges says is true (as usual), but I feel like, in this case, it just looks bad. “Alltime” looks very squished. I feel like a hyphen would have opened things up a bit, and made it look cleaner.

  • Alexa // September 13, 2007 at 10:44 am

    Heh, that magazine is sitting in my bathroom and I didn’t even notice.

  • rich // September 14, 2007 at 12:04 pm

    Also on the sports beat…Mike Dowling’s column in BostonNOW the other day (”Open Mikes” ;) featured a typo that really drives me crazy: “alot.” What makes people think that’s a word? Because the English language has (sort of) simliar constructions — afire, apiece, astride? I see this all the time and just don’t get it.

  • SawxFan // September 14, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    New to the blog, but not new to the mission! I’ve been known to return emails with corrections!

  • Mark // September 15, 2007 at 4:58 pm

    For the record (who gives a damn about the record, anyway?), I agree with dlipkin. I’m a big fan of the hyphen, and I think it just looks wrong without it.

    (thinking about the other day’s thread, I was tempted to write that it looks “wrongly.” ;)

  • Adrian // September 28, 2007 at 5:59 am

    “Alltime” is fine. A hyphenated word is just that–a word, one word. Therefore hyphenated words may be written as one word without the hyphen. In many cases I wouldn’t recommend that the hyphen be removed–it’s often serving a useful purpose–but there’s no need to nitpick in the way you do. Just makes you look silly.

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