Got an email recently purporting to be from a financial services company that I do business with, X. It includes the X logo and small-letter verbiage directing me to visit the X web site in the normal way. Which I expect a lot of people don’t do, but rather click the message’s link.

The big lettering that forms the main message, with a highly visible link in the second sentence, says as follows, sic:

Thank you for your X account information. This message confirms your X account requires update.

To protect and keep your X account up to date, Please UPDATE YOUR X ACCOUNT immediately.

Ah, the want of an indefinite article gives the game away, if you didn’t know that companies like X don’t send messages like this anyway. As in, “your X account requires [an] update.” There’s also the matter of the errant capital letter in “Please.”

A missing article made me think of this scene. Remarkably enough, since I haven’t seen that movie since it was new in 1976. The scene was easy enough to find. I Googled “Murder by Death ar” (as in the first two letters of articles) and one of the auto-suggestions was “Murder by Death use your articles.”