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Jonathon Owen
@ArrantPedantry
, 4 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
My hobby: Dinging the @NewYorker for usage errors that virtually nobody but the New Yorker's copyeditors care about. "Pawned off" for "palmed off"? Why, I never!

newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
I'd bet most copyeditors are unaware that this is even a thing. "Pawn off" is several times more common than "palm off" in COCA.
Just to be clear, I don't actually care about this supposed error. As @joshuajfriedman points out, it's 250 years old, and as the corpus data shows, it's more common.
Frankly, I'm surprised that there are as many hits as there are for "palmed off," and I wonder how many of those only exist at all because of copyeditors.
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Jonathon Owen
@ArrantPedantry
Great thread on prescriptivism and the path to enlightenment.
Also, did you know that English actually used to have a "whichm"? (Well, technically, it was "hwilcum", but you get the point.)
"Which" comes from the Old English "hwilc", which is a compound of the stems that give us "who" and "like"/"-ly".
Read 8 tweets
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Jonathon Owen
@ArrantPedantry
Oh, man, this comic. I've met Orson Scott Card a few times and always had positive interactions with him, but I've heard other stories like this one.
I actually met my wife because of him. I used to post a lot on his forum, and one time at a signing I told him my forum handle.
He not only recognized the name but was excited to meet me. He introduced me to his wife, who was the forum admin. I couldn't believe it—a famous author was excited to meet *me*!
Read 11 tweets
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Jonathon Owen
@ArrantPedantry
A recent discussion about whether the line "I'm gonna have to science the shit out out of this" was in @andyweirauthor's book The Martian or just the movie reminded me of one of my favorite facts: "science" and "shit" are related. So let's science the shit out of this etymology.
It all starts (as so many of these things do) with Proto-Indo-European. The root *skey meant 'to cut, split, separate'. The extended form *skeyd became "scit" in Old English.
The "sc" sequence was originally pronounced "sk" in Germanic, but it became /ʃ/ (the "sh" sound) in Old English. The "sh" spelling came later under the influence of French scribes.
Read 21 tweets

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jordan pickett
@jordantpickett
gave a fun lecture this morning on ancient tsunamis + their archaeological signatures + societal effects for my "climate change and catastrophes in antiquity" course here at @universityofga . Anybody want a thread? 🤓🌊
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(1) "SPYFALL"
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Juha Keskinen
@MacFinn44
New #TrumpRussia plane tracking thread @Khanoisseur @conspirator0 @SaysDana @dark_wisdom_ @3L3V3NTH @knowledgevendor @SureReality @mcleary @MontanaSkullzx5 @genetic_warrior @brazencapital @ropebelt @MsEnergyHealer @wikiwachee @kate_hawkins776 @Peaceful_411 @ThomasS4217
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