Jonathon Owen

@arrantpedantry

Editor • Writer • Linguist • Ironic meta-pedant • Villain • Cat person Blog: Merch:

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Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· 28d

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

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· 28d

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"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Jul 14

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.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Jul 8

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."

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Jul 2

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

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Jul 2

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

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Jun 1

A Despair.com poster showing a thunderstorm, with the caption

Pessimism
Every dark cloud has a silver lining, but lightning kills hundreds of people each year who are trying to find it.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· May 29

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."

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· May 28

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· May 13

"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.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· May 13

A piece of chocolate cake sitting on a plate

A medal on a red, white, and blue ribbon that reads "HERO"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· May 12

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.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· May 6

The struggle is real.

A very fluffy gray cat sitting on a gray office chair

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 27

The math checks out

A very windblown red fox stands in the snow with the words "IT HECKIN WIDNY" around it in Impact font

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 27

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."

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 15

ATTN: @ryanqnorth.bsky.social!!! www.engadget.com/ai/shoe-comp...

A headline reading "Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy" with the subhead "Say hello to 'NewBird AI.'"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 13

A "Get in, loser" meme with the text "We're going to shed our corporeal forms and become beings of pure energy"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 6

The Alliance of Magicians from Arrested Development. Gob is holding a sign that reads, "We Demand To Be Taken Seriously"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 3

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

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Apr 1

A Calvin and Hobbes strip. In panel 1, Calvin sits at a table with Hobbes, writing a paper. He says, "I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them." In panel 2 he says, "I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity." In panel 3 he holds his paper up and says, "With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?" In panel 4, Hobbes takes the paper and reads, "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Transrelational Gender Modes." Calvin says, "Academia, here I come!"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 31

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

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

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 27

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...

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 25

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 23

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"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 23

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.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 13

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.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 11

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.

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 4

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!"

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Mar 2

Jonathon Owen@arrantpedantry· Feb 25

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