The Teletubbygraph does it again - UPDATED

Did you see that story about the Thai bomb disposal guy who survived a small car bomb going off literally right next to him? Did you see The Telegraph's article on it? Well, I say article but one glaring error and one weird one make me wonder if it was a copy and paste job from somewhere else on teh interwebs.

The bomb disposal expert despite being lawn away (sic) nearly 10-meters by the explosion, picked himself up and walked away. He was treated for minor injuries.

First the weird one - what the hell does being 'lawn away' mean? The car wasn't moving and so I think we can rule out possible confusion about being mown down, so all that's left is a conflation of 'launched' and 'lawn'. This doesn't seem likely to be a typo since the U and W keys are half a keyboard apart but I suppose it could be because the person who wrote it doesn't speaking and writing the English so goodly, which admittedly might include quite a number of people supposedly educated to ASBO GCSE standard in Britain over the last decade or two.

Now if that's the case then it seems like a lousy bit of sub-editing not to have picked that up, but I think it pales almost into insignificance against the truly shithouse example that followed it. Let's have a look at the poor guy being lawn away nearly ten metres, shall we?

Click for biggerisation

I do realise that not everyone in the UK knows what a metre is in old money but I would have thought that the fact that we're talking about ten of them would make most people think that it must be a reasonable distance, right? I mean, if a metre was about the same as a foot that'd mean the guy would have been lawn ten feet away, and since from the pictures it's clear it wasn't even that far you'd need to be under the impression that a metre is about 6 or 8 inches. Somehow I doubt that's a very commonly held belief even among the dafter newspaper sub-editors, which leads me to speculate that in fact the sub-editing just had less awareness and attention to detail than a goldfish on Rohypnol.

Or maybe there wasn't any sub-editing.

Is this where The Tele got ten metres from?

Maybe, not unlike last month's Bugatti that wasn't, the online Tele is being padded with content pulled and repackaged from elsewhere on the web, possibly by some very junior hack in a hurry and without much in the way of sub-editing or proofing before being put out on teh interwebs in all its inaccurate glory.

It'd be nice to know which because I was tempted to spend a tenner and treat The Teletubbygraph to one of these to use as a reference the next time someone is lawn any distance through the air.

But if no bugger's actually checking the content before it goes out I shan't bother.



UPDATE - Mrs Exile suggests that I should point out that this blog is far from error free, though of course my entire writing, editing and sub-editing staff consists of me, myself and I whereas The Telegraph has... well, who knows exactly, but certainly a lot more than I do. Still, in the interests of fairness I'll try to remember to say so the next time I lawn into them over something.