The winner of £100 worth of books from the Guardian Bookshop and a signed copy of For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection will be announced soon, along with five runners-up who also win signed copies. Thanks to everyone who took part

1. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the committee chair, said “an informed and proper debate was needed”.

Answer: The tense of the verb inside the quotation is wrong.

The quotation is an uneasy mix of direct and reported speech. If you are quoting him, it should be “an informed and proper debate is needed”. If you want to use reported speech, remove the quotation marks, in which case the “was” would be correct. Try to combine the two and you end up with a dog’s breakfast.

2. Matchstalk man: LS Lowry, quintessential painter of northern, working-class life, is the subject of a wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain.

Answer: There’s a rogue comma between “northern” and “working-class”.

If you wouldn’t put “and”, you don’t need a comma. You wouldn’t put “and” in this example because it would mean something different, namely that Lowry painted northern and working-class life (as if they were separate things), rather than northern working-class life.

3. Sad demise of the Scotsman as Johnston Press announces departure of once proud paper’s managing director.

Answer: “Demise”? Do you mean “decline”?

Quite so. Sadly, “demise” is what we published, suggesting the paper had closed.

4. Outstanding performances include Caryl Morgan’s Beatie, in bobby socks and denim, on the cusp of womanhood but still impressionable and dreamy, and Sara Harris-Davies as the mother she still looks up to.

Answer: You can’t be on the cusp of one thing. Although it is often misused to mean “on the brink” or “on the verge”, strictly “on the cusp” involves two things, for example “on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini” or, as it should have been here, “on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood”.

5. Standard Chartered accused of hiding $250bn in illegal transactions by New York regulator.

Answer: The clumsy word order suggests that the regulator is involved in illegal transactions.

The syntax is indeed horribly mangled. The headline needs to be rewritten as: “Standard Chartered accused by New York regulator of hiding $250bn in illegal transactions” or, better still because it uses an active rather than passive verb, “New York regulator accuses Standard Chartered of hiding $250bn in illegal transactions.”

6. The fishing scam impacting some Guardian accounts is still ongoing.

Answer: Spelling mistake. It’s a phishing scam.

Alternative answer: “Still ongoing” is tautologous, as well as ugly.

Thanks to the readers who have pointed out that there were two correct answers. My mistake. It goes to show that setting multiple-choice questions in a language quiz is tricky. I had meant to contrast the spelling mistake, which is clearly wrong (unless actual fishing had been involved), with the jargon of “impacting” and “still ongoing”, which while hideous are not grammatically wrong.

7. Jonnie Peacock is sat in one of Manchester’s grander hotels …

Answer: “Sat” should be “sitting”.

You add the the present participle, “sitting”, or the past participle, “sat”, to an auxiliary verb to get the right tense. In this case, it is the present continuous tense, which requires the present participle.

8. Responsibility for our behaviour apparently no longer rests on us as individuals but on anyone whom a lawyer can claim was “responsible” for our contact with others.

Answer: That “whom” should be “who”.

The lawyer would claim that “he”, not “him”, was responsible, so it’s “who”, not “whom”.

9. The challenge for Ed Miliband is how to firmly capture the right tone of indignation at this injustice and class bias, how witheringly to crush the wilful ignorance of Tory backbenchers.

Answer: Ambiguity alert! The adverb “witheringly” is in the wrong place.

There’s nothing wrong with split infinitives, and in trying to avoid one here, the writer makes it unclear whether the challenge is one of degree (how witheringly the ignorance should be crushed) or method (how best to crush it witheringly).

10. Dylan, McCartney and Bop bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo.

Answer: Are they thinking of Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula?

Or: Are they thinking of Little Richard’s “awopbopaloobop alopbamboom”?

Or: It’s only rock’n’roll, but the person who wrote this headline doesn’t like it.

The headline that appeared in the paper is a travesty of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, with Gene Vincent thrown in. Either way, it doesn’t rock. So we allowed any of the three answers.

Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/nov/12/mind-your-language-quiz-answers