From time to time, I’ll call attention to a badly written or inadvertently funny piece of copy.
One recent example was this headline on an online business newsletter: CEOs Pour Over State of Our Business Survey Results.
Looking past the odd wording, what caught my eye was the homonym mistake. The writer meant “pore,” as in “study carefully.” The selected word, “pour,” involves carefully dispensing something upon or into something else. That implies one of two things – either the CEOs were pouring some unknown substance on the results, or someone else was pouring a big ol’ pitcher full of CEOs on those results.