diff --git a/doc/users/recipes.rst b/doc/users/recipes.rst
index 216630f9e92f..a92618fb7d0d 100644
--- a/doc/users/recipes.rst
+++ b/doc/users/recipes.rst
@@ -123,7 +123,7 @@ you will see that the x tick labels are all squashed together.
    plt.plot(r.date, r.close)
    plt.title('Default date handling can cause overlapping labels')
 
-Another annoyance is that if you hover the mouse over a the window and
+Another annoyance is that if you hover the mouse over the window and
 look in the lower right corner of the matplotlib toolbar
 (:ref:`navigation-toolbar`) at the x and y coordinates, you see that
 the x locations are formatted the same way the tick labels are, eg
@@ -330,8 +330,7 @@ nice to make the legend frame transparent.
    ax.plot(np.random.randn(300), 'o-', label='normal distribution')
    ax.plot(np.random.rand(300), 's-', label='uniform distribution')
    ax.set_ylim(-3, 3)
-   leg = ax.legend(loc='best', fancybox=True)
-   leg.get_frame().set_alpha(0.5)
+   ax.legend(loc='best', fancybox=True, framealpha=0.5)
 
    ax.set_title('fancy, transparent legends')