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Jonathon Owen Profile picture
Jonathon Owen
@ArrantPedantry
Editor • Writer • Linguist • Ironic meta-pedant • Husband to @brinestowen • One of the most earnestly delightful people on Twitter, according to @BCDreyer
@AlgoCompSynth@universeodon.com by znmeb Profile picture 1 subscribed
Nov 11, 2020 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
This is . . . not how rhymes work.

Would you like to learn how rhymes really work? Of course you would! So let's talk about syllables and stress. Pretty much every learned how to count syllables in elementary school. A simple way of thinking about syllables is just that every "beat" in a word is a syllable. You clap along as you say a word, and that helps you figure out where the syllables are and how many there are.
Nov 10, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The flip side of this, of course, is monochrome icons like the ones Mac OS and Windows 10 have moved to. Stripping out the color removes a lot of visual information that helps you identify the icons quickly.

Just compare Mac OS 10.5 to 10.15. Are the older icons a little overwrought? Sure, but at least they were easily identifiable. The new ones are mostly just slightly different gray rectangles. ImageImage
Sep 21, 2020 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
I keep hearing ads on Pandora for the breakfast menu at McDonalds, and I'm driving myself crazy trying to figure out the morphological rules of the Mc prefix. At first glance, it seems that biscuits are Mc-less
Bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit
Sausage biscuit
Sausage biscuit with egg
Sep 17, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This is a great thread that explains, among other things, why some Latin words meaning "two" start with du- (as in "dual") and why some start with bi- (as in "biannual"). Here's another surprising Old Latin change: "lingua" (as in "tongue" or "language") is cognate with "tongue". They both come from the Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstru…
Sep 15, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I'm grading editing tests from intern applicants again, and it's reminding me how much I hate most editing tests. Too many of them, I think, don't really test editing skill. It's more of a test of how well you can guess what the test maker is thinking.
Sep 14, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Cat owners of Twitter, I need some advice. This adorable little pest is making working from home a real pain. Back when I worked in the office, she would spend most of the day sleeping under my bed. Now she spends most of the day whining for attention. I'm working in my bedroom, and I keep the door closed to try to block sound from the kids. Phoebe wants to stay in the bedroom with me, but she's not content to sleep under the bed all day anymore. Now she wants to play all day.
Sep 9, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I've mostly settled on starting an email with just someone's name, though now I'm wondering how many people I've really annoyed that way. "Dear X" just seems too formal and old-fashioned to me. My thesis advisor starts his emails that way, and I at some point I started doing the same when responding to him, but otherwise I avoid it.
Sep 2, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I'm usually not a fan of objective statements on résumés, but I have to admire this honesty. Image I mean, let's be real here: I mostly only work because I've got bills to pay too.
Sep 1, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I've been working from home since late March, but since I'm teaching a blended class this fall, I thought it would make the most sense to come up to campus for the whole day on the days when I'm teaching. So here I am in my office for the first day in over five months, and let me tell you: it is Decidedly Weird.
Aug 25, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
What Chicago Manual of Style rule would you like to launch into the sun? Mine is this one about breaking URLs after periods, slashes, and hyphens. #AmEditing Image I really doubt most people are going to see a period or slash and think that's the end of the URL when it obviously continues on the next line. Plus, who actually types in the URL? It's usually far easier to type the title of the article into Google and let it take you there.
Aug 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The more I think about this, the more I think I don't totally agree with it. It frames mistakivism on the one hand as rules that are misremembered or were wrong to begin with, which leaves prescriptivism as all the rules that are good. But prescriptivism is just an approach that says what's right or wrong or says what you should or shouldn't do. If I say that you shouldn't split an infinitive, I'm making a prescription, even if I'm making a bad one.
Aug 22, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As I said a couple of weeks ago, one of my sons recently spent a few days in the hospital when we discovered he has type 1 diabetes. And just a couple of days ago, nearly three weeks after he was discharged, we got this letter from our insurance preauthorizing his hospital stay. Image (Side note: The letter was sent on the 11th of August but got here on the 20th, so this mail slowdown is real.)
Aug 21, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Work-related rant: I hate our time-tracking system (if you can call it a system) so much. It's so unnecessarily complicated, and I really don't understand why we don't invest in some software that can handle time tracking and billing. Back when we were all working in the office, the process was to fill out a spreadsheet with all our time on every job every day. (Some people print it out and then write everything in by hand, but I fill it out in Excel and then print it out.)
Aug 20, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Random thought: Why does every single streaming media service—whether it's Pandora or Spotify or Hulu or whatever—play the same few commercials over and over? I don't remember commercials on regular TV or radio being so repetitive. For example, when I listen to Pandora on a particular device (but, weirdly, only on that device), literally the only commercial I've been getting lately is one for another Pandora station called Five Hour Energy Get Up and Go Radio.
Aug 18, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Inspired by a discussion elsewhere: Do you use "no problem" in response to someone thanking you? If you're not sure how to answer, you can interpret "do you use" to mean "do you ever use" and not just "do you always use".
Aug 14, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Google is great in a lot of ways (and creepy and invasive in a lot of others), but I cannot for the life of me understand why so many of their services seem to be on an endless treadmill of retirement, replacement, and rebranding. Image There was Google TV, which was replaced with Android TV, which was kind-of-but-not-really replaced by Chromecast, but then I've heard that Chromecast it going away and actually being replaced by Android TV.
Aug 13, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Question for my fellow copy editors: When something comes to you editing, how many times do you typically read it from start to finish before sending it on to the next step? I realize that everyone's work is different (that is, there's a big difference between reading a direct mailer twice and doing two full editing passes on a book) and that workflows and deadlines vary a lot too.
Aug 13, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Copy editor confession: I can never remember the difference between "premier" and "premiere" and have to look them up every time. #AmEditing Also, I think pairs of words that are only distinguished by a silent "e" on the end are dumb. What is this, French?
Aug 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Hey, folks! You might remember me talking about a chapter that I was writing for an academic book. Well, I think I neglected to mention that the book is available for preorder! It's called Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity. multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/La… If academic books on the values of prescriptivism are your thing, you can get 75 percent off until September 30 with the code LPCR75. multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/La… Image
Aug 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The German word for "jewelry" will never not make me do a double-take. Image I thought this too, but apparently most etymology dictionaries disagree.

Aug 11, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Today's fact-checking rabbit hole: An article mentioned "Te Beretitenti Taneti Maamau, then president of Kiribati." I looked him up and it turns out that he's still the president. Easy enough fix: "then president" just becomes "the current president." But wait. His Wikipedia page just calls him Taneti Maamau, not Te Beretitenti Taneti Maamau. Even his official government page just calls him President Taneti Maamau. president.gov.ki/president-tane…