iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 21/09/2026

brb, adding similar-looking but unrelated words to the "Etymology" section of every Wikipedia article I can find

The Etymology section of the Wikipedia entry for "melamine": "The German word Melamin was coined by combining the words melam (a derivative of ammonium thiocyanate) and amine.[8][9] Melamine is, therefore, unrelated etymologically to the root melas (μέλας, meaning 'black' in Greek), from which the words melanin, a pigment, and melatonin, a hormone, are formed."

Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 18/09/2026

Garner apparently has a different take on it, though I've read this last paragraph four or five times now and couldn't tell you what it is.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 04/09/2026

Welp, they got me pegged. mydialect.us/quiz-standar...

A heat map of the US, showing the highest concentration of red around Utah

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 28/08/2026

No, he's the cat from that one kids' movie.

A poster from The Adventures of Milo and Otis, showing an orange tabby cat with its paw around a pug as they sit atop a hill covered with wildflowers

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 13/08/2026

This shirt is Phoebe approved.

A fluffy tuxedo cat with yellow eyes sits on my lap while I wear a black T-shirt showing a black and white Himalayan cat sitting on an open book (presumably a dictionary). It says "Merriam-Webster" below the book.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 16/07/2026

Here's one of the official movie posters, and you can see more here. None of them have that Greek alphabet abomination. www.themoviedb.org/movie/136833...

A movie poster for The Odyssey, showing Matt Damon in armor with one of those head crest thingies

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 16/07/2026

Also, what the heck is up with this automatic alt text?

Automatic alt text of the Willy Wonka "The suspense is terrible" gif, reading, "Dr. Seuss: The Suspense Is Terrible"

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 14/07/2026

Specifically something like one of these, known as a close stool/stool of ease/necessary stool/night stool/probably a bunch of other names. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_s...

A wooden toilet chair. It looks like a regular wooden chair with arms and a back, but it has what looks like a toilet lid in the middle.

A close stool. It's a box with a red upholstered seat with a hole in the middle and a lid that can cover the whole seat.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 08/07/2026

I wonder how many T. rex skeletons named Gus there are. www.facebook.com/share/p/1ERo...

Screenshot of a Facebook post by IGN that reads "Gus the T. rex is up for auction this month after years of excavation and reconstruction of 183 fossilized bones, with an opening bid set at $19 million." The picture shows a T. rex skeleton with the text "One of the most complete T. rex skeletons named 'Gus' is up for auction starting at $19M."

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 02/07/2026

Thanks! I saw it fly into a neighbor's yard, and I already had my phone out to take a picture when it flew up onto the fence right in front of me. Scared the crap out of me. This was actually the first photo I got because I had the camera zoomed in.

A zoomed-in picture of an angry-looking hawk on a vinyl fence, screeching and spreading its wings

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 02/07/2026

Very cool! We've had some hawks around this neighborhood for years, and I've never been able to figure out if they're Cooper's hawks or sharp-shinned hawks. Here's one I had a close encounter with last year:

An angry-looking hawk (either Cooper's or sharp-shinned) sitting on a white vinyl fence, screeching and spreading its wings

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 29/05/2026

This cake mix-up is a great illustration of a sneaky feature of English phonology: aspiration. But first, some background. www.reddit.com/r/Baking/com...

A cake with "Ghost Dealers" written on it. It has the caption "I asked for go Steelers."

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 13/05/2026

"Be like your dad," she said tearfully, "suspicious that your wife is trying to poison you." www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05...

Screenshot of an article reading:

The 36-year-old woman spent most of her 30-minute court statement speaking directly to her young sons, giving them advice about marriage, life and the importance of supporting one another.

“Be like your dad,” she said tearfully.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 12/05/2026

Mine's not that old—it's apparently from 1996—but it's a REAL chore to use.

A single-volume compact Oxford English Dictionary in a slipcase, with a magnifying glass that's about two inches thick

A single-volume compact OED opened to a random page, with the magnifying glass set on one of the pages. Each page has nine micrographically reproduced pages from the original OED.

A closeup of the magnifying glass set down on a page of the compact OED. The text is still incredibly tiny.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 27/04/2026

This part really is mind-boggling, though. A backup that's stored on the same volume is not really a backup!

A paragraph with the heading "Railway’s road to ruin":

"The PocketOS boss puts greater blame on Railway’s architecture than on the deranged AI agent for the database’s irretrievable destruction. Briefly, the cloud provider's API allows for destructive action without confirmation, it stores backups on the same volume as the source data, and 'wiping a volume deletes all backups.' Crane also points out that CLI tokens have blanket permissions across environments."

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 03/04/2026

Am I looking in the wrong spot? I'm not seeing them online. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/a...

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 31/03/2026

aww yeah I'm really excited for @korystamper.bsky.social's new book!

Holding my copy of Kory Stamper's new book True Color

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 27/03/2026

I remember hearing and saying "hoagie" as a kid in Utah, though it seems like "sub" has taken over since then. I'm not sure how Utah ended up using "hoagie" so much more than surrounding states. dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q... www.businessinsider.com/american-eng...

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 23/03/2026

As opposed to loudly leaking radiation. gizmodo.com/sunken-sovie...

A Gizmodo headline reading "Sunken Soviet Submarine Is Quietly Leaking Radiation Decades Later, Study Finds"

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 23/03/2026

I've wondered about this too, and according to the News on the Web Corpus, it really is surging! I'd have to dig into the data a little more to see where the increase is coming from, but something is definitely going on here. www.english-corpora.org/now/?c=now&q...

A bar graph from the NOW Corpus showing the changing rate of use of "quietly" between 2010 and 2026. It starts at 16.49 words per million, drops to 10.36 by 2019, and then shoots up to 36.45 by 2026.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 13/03/2026

Have you ever wondered what the deal is with "inflammable" and "flammable"? (Of course you have. Everyone has.) You may already know that the "in-" prefix there isn't actually a negative, but what you may not know is that that little prefix has been causing problems for over two millennia.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 11/03/2026

If I owned a company that offered printing services, I would probably use a different image for my ad.

Screenshot of a VistaPrint ad from Facebook. It shows a blue tumbler that reads

CARING
MAKES
ALL THE
DIFFERE
NCE

But the "NCE" at the bottom is cut off, so you can only see the tops of the letters.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 04/03/2026

Sometimes I feel a little like this comic. I want compliments, but then they make me feel kind of awkward and uncomfortable. theycantalk.com/post/1515838...

A cat rubs against a human's legs and says "Pet me."

The human reaches down to pet the cat, but the cat backs away and says "With your eyes!"

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 25/02/2026

We've had Luna (the gray one) since 2016, Phoebe (the tuxedo) since 2018, and Zelda (the colorpoint tabby) since 2021.

A very fluffy gray cat with a derpy expression and a very nice blep

A fluffy little tuxedo cat sitting on a gray couch and leaning against a pillow

A colorpoint tabby cat with light blue eyes, sitting in a box as I pull back one of the flaps to peek inside

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 23/02/2026

I had a '93 Buick Regal (much like the one in this picture) with a hood ornament. I don't think I've owned a car newer than that that had one.

A dark red 1993 Buick Regal. It has a hood ornament, as all fancy cars once did.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 22/02/2026

I think my Scrabble tiles are trying to tell me something.

Scrabble tiles reading ICE OUT (with a blank tile in the middle)

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 10/02/2026

Um. Is this proofreader really asking me to change "might contradict" to "might could contradict"? #AmEditing

Screenshot from a marked-up PDF in which the proofreader indicated that I should insert "could" after "might" in the sentence "What you find might contradict assumptions that are important to you (or your stakeholders)."

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 06/02/2026

Has anyone ever had InDesign refuse to break hyphenated compounds at the hyphen and instead break them in the middle of one of the words? It's been a while since I've worked in InDesign, but I don't think I've seen this behavior before. Fiddling with the hyphenation settings doesn't seem to help.