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"To meets" should be "to meet".

Context:

The announcement follows talks in Beijing last week between US and North Korean negotiators, the first since negotiations were suspended after Kim's death in December from a heart attack.

Before his death, the US and North Korea were close to such an agreement, which appears to meets US preconditions for restarting the six-nation talks suspended three years ago.

"The United States still has profound concerns regarding North Korean behavior across a wide range of areas, but today's announcement reflects important, if limited, progress in addressing some of these," Nuland said.
More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/29/north-korea-suspend-nuclear-tests-us

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Type: Question • Score: 1 • Views: 752 • Replies: 12

[+4] - contrex - 02/29/2012Google exact=phrase search for "which appears to meets US preconditions" gave 577 hits, including the original AP (Associated Press)* report** and all the news sites (so far) which have...

View best answer, chosen by oristarA

Astonishingly, USAToday's version made the same mistake:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-02-29/us-north-korea-suspends-nuclear/53298188/1

Though they have not forgot to use AmE version "finalize" instead of "finalise".

Interesting.

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Google exact=phrase search for "which appears to meets US preconditions" gave 577 hits, including the original AP (Associated Press)* report** and all the news sites (so far) which have used it. So a little unfair to blame it on the Guardian, who attributed it to AP at the top of the story. It may be that their contract with AP prevents them from editing items.** It looks to me as if the AP authors may have originally written "the US and North Korea were close to such an agreement, which meets US preconditions" and then decided to be cautious and insert "appears to" and omitted, in their haste, to delete the final 's' from 'meets'. In other words, a familiar type of typographical error.

*Associated Press (AP) is an agency which supplies news stories to other outlets such as newspapers and websites.

** Original AP report: http://hosted2.ap.org/PAWIC/APUSnews/Article_2012-02-29-US-NK%20Nuclear/id-b3183db163bf40e48a6b7e8caf6bc12c

*** I think perhaps not, since they (or someone) edited the original AmE 'finalize' to the BrE 'finalise'.

2 Replies

@oristarA,

The Guardian is often called the Grauniad because of the amount of typos it has. Things are a lot better now, but you still get typos. It's the quality of its journalism that matters, not the amount of typos it has.

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@contrex,

Quote:

It looks to me as if the AP authors may have originally written "the US and North Korea were close to such an agreement, which meets US preconditions" and then decided to be cautious and insert "appears to" and omitted, in their haste, to delete the final 's' from 'meets'. In other words, a familiar type of typographical error.

Excellent analysis...and probably right on the button. I thought about this a long while and never saw that possibility. Glad you did...and that you shared it.

1 Reply

@contrex,

contrex wrote:

Google exact=phrase search for "which appears to meets US preconditions" gave 577 hits, including the original AP (Associated Press)* report** and all the news sites (so far) which have used it. So a little unfair to blame it on the Guardian, who attributed it to AP at the top of the story. It may be that their contract with AP prevents them from editing items.** It looks to me as if the AP authors may have originally written "the US and North Korea were close to such an agreement, which meets US preconditions" and then decided to be cautious and insert "appears to" and omitted, in their haste, to delete the final 's' from 'meets'. In other words, a familiar type of typographical error.

*Associated Press (AP) is an agency which supplies news stories to other outlets such as newspapers and websites.

** Original AP report: http://hosted2.ap.org/PAWIC/APUSnews/Article_2012-02-29-US-NK%20Nuclear/id-b3183db163bf40e48a6b7e8caf6bc12c

*** I think perhaps not, since they (or someone) edited the original AmE 'finalize' to the BrE 'finalise'.

It is exactly the way I made the same mistake for a bunch of times which often embarrassed me. Luckily, I now know I'm not alone. Smile

But the switch between "finalise" and "finalize" has made the matter a bit complicated. Razz

1 Reply

@oristarA,

oristarA wrote:

But the switch between "finalise" and "finalize" has made the matter a bit complicated.

Why?

1 Reply

@contrex,

contrex wrote:

oristarA wrote:
But the switch between "finalise" and "finalize" has made the matter a bit complicated.

Why?

If there was an agreement between AP and Grauniad which stipulated that the latter had no right to change anything in the report that AP offered to it, it is understandable that Grauniad had to accept the report as is and we cannot blame Grauniad for the naive grammatical mistake ("to meets"). But the truth is that Grauniad had changed "finalize" into "finalise", which means that Grauniad has the right to correct possible mistakes in the report received from AP. So it is probable that Grauniad made the same mistake and should be criticized...

1 Reply

@oristarA,

You've not met many Guardian readers have you? The use of American spellings causes outrage, and fills up the complaints box more than anything else. It's best to play safe and stick with what the readers find acceptable.

0 Replies

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

Excellent analysis...and probably right on the button. I thought about this a long while and never saw that possibility. Glad you did...and that you shared it.

Hi Frank, I read your profile and find that you said " But despite all the action, I still manage to play to a handicap in the high teens."

Did you mean "high tees"?

1 Reply

@oristarA,

H, Oristar,

Quote:

Did you mean "high tees"?

No...I meant "high teens."

When I wrote that bio, my handicap was 16-17.

Last year, it hovered around 14...so I have improved.

Our handicap season in New Jersey does not begin until April 1st, so my scores right now do not count. We've had a great winter (no snow and reasonable temps) and I have been playing quite a bit and I am expecting to start strong.

Right now, it looks as though I may have a good year, but as Tiger Woods could tell ya...golf is a game of the mind and things can change quickly!

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Typos are pretty common in online news services too. MSN and AP seem to have fairly frequent ones, which often happen because someone obviously rewrote a sentence and didn't quite delete all the parts of the first version .

Glad to hear American spelling is gaining favoUr in the UK, in spite of stick-in-the-mud counterattacks.

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We don't know that the Guardian changed the spelling. Possibly AP automatically alters spellings for BrE customers. I searched for an exact phrase from the AP report, "Clinton said the US will meet with North Korea to finalise details for a proposed package of" using the BrE "finalise" spelling and found that it also appeared thus in The Australian and a whole bunch of Australian and New Zealand news sites.

Anyhow, it would be a little misleading to suppose that -ize spellings are exclusively American and -ise spellings exclusively British. In each zone one spelling is the majority usage, and the other is less used.

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