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I'm sorry, Christian. :(

Reposted by Jonathon Owen

Peter Sokolowski @petersokolowski.bsky.social · 4h

I'm thrilled to announce my upcoming book: BY DEFINITION: The Surprising History of the English Dictionary To be published in February! read.macmillan.com/lp/by-defini...

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 3h

It's me. I got smoked. ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 29/09/2026

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025)

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 28/09/2026

And the fact that they italicize journal volume numbers (but not issue numbers) drives me absolutely batty.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 28/09/2026

I will never understand APA style's rules for capitalization in reference lists. Article, chapter, and book titles are sentence case, while journal titles are title case? Make it make sense. #AmEditing

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 28/09/2026

People are out here just rawdogging new slang.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 28/09/2026

Years of being told "It's '[name] and I,' not 'me and [name]'" have really cooked people's brains.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 28/09/2026

People pay good money for inversion tables

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 25/09/2026

[smugly] Actually, I'm on the Bad Jonathons list.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 25/09/2026

Skeets That Personally Offended Me, a list: 1. This one.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 24/09/2026

Me too! I haven't had any in years.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 23/09/2026

Since Homo erectus first walked these shores some 900,000 years ago, English culture has always absorbed and adapted.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 23/09/2026

And if there really has been less change in the last 400 years, I'm not sure how much is attributable to standardization, higher rates of literacy and education, or other factors.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 23/09/2026

Yeah, though I'm not sure how familiar Shakespeare or his contemporaries were with works in Middle English. It's possible that it seemed like less of a leap to them than it does to us.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 22/09/2026

Shakespeare did not speak or write in Old English (or "Olde" English)! Old English was spoken from about 500 AD to 1100 AD. Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, which was spoken from about the late fifteenth century to the late seventeenth century.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 22/09/2026

Well, I see that like five other people have responded while I was writing that. (And it took me a few read-throughs too.)

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 22/09/2026

First wife (poor Mary) has two daughters, Sybil and Marjorie, and then dies. Then Mary's husband marries the friend of one (or both?) of the girls, and that wife has a child, the narrator. So the two girls are the narrator's half-sisters and the narrator's mother's former friends.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 22/09/2026

Editing tip: The form you want is "each other's," not "each others'." Sometimes people get tripped up because it feels plural. But the reflexive form is always "each other" (not "each others"), so the possessive form just adds "'s" like a regular noun. #AmEditing

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

Possibly, though I still think a better approach is to just say what the etymology is rather than what it isn't.

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

I see what you mean, but I think it would be really easy to fall down a rabbit hole trying to anticipate what false assumptions people might make about etymology and then correct them.

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

I took it out and said something like "Removed note about unrelated words."

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

I should note that this is from the entry on "melamine" (in case that wasn't obvious). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine

en.wikipedia.org

Melamine - Wikipedia

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

Look, I love etymologies as much as the next nerd, but not every etymological sidetrack is worth sharing.

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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."

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

I was thinking: "David, I cannot show you everything." —Moira Rose

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

partly = dealing with part (of a whole) partially = dealing with the whole (but only part of it)

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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 · 18/09/2026

I've never encountered the "partly"/"partially" distinction before, and it seems pretty unintuitive and pointless to me.

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

I just found out that the cost of COBRA coverage is more than my take-home pay from my erstwhile job. Health insurance in this country is so fucking stupid.

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

Yes. It was the sixth published, but it's a prequel.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 17/09/2026

Side note: I loved The Chronicles of Narnia when I was in elementary school, but I haven't really cared about them in a long time. But it's really bugging me that they're making The Magician's Nephew first instead of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 17/09/2026

"Meryl Streep cast as Aslan" (in the upcoming Chronicles of Narnia movie) bsky.app/profile/chuk...

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 17/09/2026

A quick glance at the trending topic shows that apparently *everyone* is misreading that as "Meryl Streep cast as Asian."

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 17/09/2026

Or is there some setting I'm missing somewhere? (This is Office 2021 for PC.)

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 17/09/2026

So Microsoft Word just doesn't autosave anymore unless you're willing to put everything in OneDrive, huh? #AmEditing

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 17/09/2026

I give this idea one MeowMeowBeen.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 15/09/2026

Anyone have any opinions (or better yet, data) on whether the "Open to Work" banner on LinkedIn is helpful? I've heard that some recruiters actually avoid people who have it active.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 11/09/2026

I'm so sorry, Iva! I don't understand what kind of person abandons a pet, but I'm glad you gave her a good home.

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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 10/09/2026

I can't understand the mindset of someone who would feel the need to (1) make that and (2) share it with the creator. What are they hoping for? To be told how clever they are for taking someone else's work and feeding into the Slop-O-Matic?

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