Having ratted out Continental’s bad English, I don’t suppose I should spare the New York Times.

One of my super-dooper birthday presents from MrLittlePants this year was a TimesSelect subscription. Previously, the disappointment of having half my clicks blocked kept me away from the Times’s site entirely. Now I’m on that ho all the time.

And I’m finally seeing how bad copy editing is for live news sites. L.P. has been complaining about this for years. I thought he was exaggerating, but now I see that just about every other story has errors.

Incredibly, this is about the same as my own error rate for posting here. (Until a certain angel proofreads… then it’s 0%.) Like most people I can’t proofread my own words worth a damn. But I thought a big newspaper would have some kind of “system.”

Today we have an article about the French language comin’ back in Maine. I’ve stopped reading it so I can report this needless French error four paragraphs in:

But now, le Français fait une rentrée — French is making a comeback.

Copy editors of New York, write this down: You do not capitalize language names in romance languages! Don’t assume that your jet-set writers, who are so quick to throw in showy foreign phrases, actually know anything.

I might let it slide if the article weren’t about the language itself. Or if they didn’t have that dramatic, know-it-all English translation after the dash. Thanks so much, linguistic authority figures.

Incidentally, their little snippet translates correctly as, “The Frenchman is making a comeback.”

Uhh… non.