Grammar: Howlers 19

One aurochs

Buttoned-down personality for buttoned-up. American? You button up your overcoat – only a collar is buttoned-down. A buttoned-up personality is clothed to the neck. Perhaps affected by “batten down the hatches”.

Under their watch (It’s a “watch” of several hours on a ship, where you are “on watch”. And you don’t want anything adverse to happen “on your watch”. It’s not like “under your eyes”.)

When you chose to glamourise and enthral when MEP candidates were attacked last year, in stead of condoning it, you laid the moral compass directly at your own feet. If you propergate violence, don't act shocked when you're on the end of exactly the same abuse. (Via Twitter. Not sure what is meant by “enthral”. Condemning, not condoning (means the opposite). A moral compass shows which direction you should travel in.)

This time of year is rife for sheep getting on their backs and not being able to get up again. (Confusing "ripe" meaning ready, and "rife" meaning abundant.)

cheaper running costs (lower running costs, cheaper running)
temperatures are warming (Temperatures are rising, the world is warming.)

Farage uses blatant sexism, homophobia and hate to insight the uneducated to violence. (incite, yougov commenter)

Therapy speak isn’t just dispelled by therapists... it comes from advice columnists, self-care advocates and celebrities, too. (slate.com, dispensed)

Meanwhile, historians, for their part, largely shrank back from the challenge of allowing so longue a durée to cast its dauntingly attenuated shadow over their discipline, “fashioning instead a view of history that begins with the rise of civilization,” and accepting “prehistory” as a kind of conceptual “buffer zone.” (Paris Review. Surely the writer means something like “extended” or “protracted” – the opposite of “attenuated”.)

Jo Swinson is a one-trip pony. (It’s “trick”, from the days when circus ponies did tricks.)

past-time for pastime (It’s something that passes the time.)
come to past for come to pass or happen (Probably from the Bible.)

Slavery was wildly condemned at the time. (widely)

The vast terra infirma of female desire. (The NYT means “terra incognita” – unknown region – not “terra firma”, or solid ground.)

Unfortunately, he was killed after a long and drawn out siege on the castle and the structure laid in ruin. (Mymodernmet.com. Long-drawn-out, the structure lay in ruins.)

The rhino is an endangered specie in Africa.
A massive horned auroch in its death throes can cause fatal damage to a wolf. (Times 2018)
“Aurochs” is singular. (Ein Aurochs, zwei Aurochse.) So are "species", "Homo sapiens" and "kudos".

Wring the changes (It’s from change-ringing – the bizarre mathematical English method of bell-ringing.)

In a reprisal of some of the arguments of the past... (unherd.com A reprisal is a retaliatory attack. “Reprise” is meant.)

She would have the fashionable coiffeur of the day. (A coiffure is created by a coiffeur, or hairdresser.)

I dislike it when the victims are ignored and I have only read a couple of monograms about two of them. (Via Twitter, monograph)

...slips of yew, Silver'd in the moon's eclipse (From a site explicating the witch’s speech from Macbeth. That’s slivered, meaning cut or picked.)

The Mail on Sunday has a coruscating attack on Jeremy Corbyn. (Andrew Marr. He means “excoriating”. "Coruscating" means "sparkling".)

It is the genteel society magazine famed for its adverts for well-heeled nannies that has been at the centre of a bitter dynastic row for almost a decade. (Jonathan Prynn, Times Jan 2019, on The Lady. The employers are “well-heeled” (rich), not their nannies, who work for a salary.)

So begins an incantation that started life on the lips of a Sumerian sorcerer six or seven millennia ago, before being penned into a clay tablet in the seventh century BC. (Publicdomainreview.org. You use a pen to write in ink on parchment or paper. Cuneiform writing was impressed into a wet clay tablet by a stylus.)

People should dispense themselves of the notion that when they sit down to reason a problem through carefully, the act of doing so automatically shields them from the effects of political bias. (via Twitter, rid themselves)

“Bored of”... we have less shrift with “bored with/by,” we say, “not of”. (Rose Wild in the Times, talking about the Times style guide. When you confess your sins, you are “shriven” – given absolution. The priest has a choice between a long and a short formula, hence "given short shrift".)

The ever-constant ebb of tourists flocking the National Monument in Jakarta Pusat (When tides “ebb”, they go out. You mean “flow” of tourists flocking “to” the monument. You’ve mixed your metaphors (tides, sheep), but never mind that for the moment.)

Selena Gomez is actually glowing in this affordable slip. (Teen Vogue)

If you sold some of those pales's that we the people pay to up keep, and the riches that you haven't seen in years stored away in volts, also some of the 6.6 billion acres of land that you own. You could truly walk your talk. (A youtube commenter on the Queen’s Christmas message.)
The phrase was banded about. Bandied about – as in batted from hand to hand. (Do you dare to bandy words with me, sir?)

Fulsome, existential, enormity – as you were. They originally meant “lots, about existence, hugeness”, and we’re returning to the first meanings.

It’s NUL points, NUL points, not nil points, NUL points...

More here, and links to the rest.