Spoctrate

Dear Spectator

You were once a fine magazine; you are now a fine magazine in need of a copy editor. If you don't believe me, just look at these errors, picked at random from your 30 June 2012 issue:

1. "become" is incorrect:

 2. Using "an homage" rather than "a homage" suggests that you are prescribing the horrid new pronunciation that lengthens and emphasises the final syllable of the word "homage". Someone once said that the further towards the end of any word a society chooses to place the stress, the greater that society's decadence:

 3. Toby Young rather undermines his argument for the kind of education he received by displaying in the phrase "these proposal" his inability to distinguish plural from singular:

 4. What are "back accounts" and what does "gave own his own" mean:

 5: "more nourishing than", surely - plus grammatically "the reason she preferred it is so she could spend more time" is wrong; it should be "the reason she preferred it is that it allowed her to spend more time":

 6. Surely "when you've seen as much and lived as long as Dorothy has" would be the correct way to express what the writer is trying to say:

 7. "neigbours" - do you not even have spellcheck:

Possibly you are well aware of all these problems and merely unable to find someone suitably qualified to do the job. If so, let me know. I'd happily take it on (depending on the salary, of course).