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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen
@arrantpedantry.com
2.4K followers 150 following 2.2K posts
Editor • Writer • Linguist • Ironic meta-pedant • Villain • Cat person Blog: https://www.arrantpedantry.com Merch: https://arrantpedantry.myspreadshop.com
www.arrantpedantry.com
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · Jan 29
Hey, check it out! I've joined the cool kids who use their own domain as their handle. You can now find me at @arrantpedantry.com.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 38m
too real
arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1h
The moral of the story is that sometimes home repairs are stupidly easy, and sometimes things spiral out of control and you end up running to the hardware store ten times in twenty-four hours. And there's often no way to predict which one you'll get.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1h
Like my hand truck had a flat tire, so I tried to change it, but then I couldn't for the life of me get the tire back on, so I tried to just replace the wheel instead, but then I couldn't find the right kind of nut to hold it on, etc. This was all before I could even get the new water heater inside!
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1h
The stupid thing is that I've replaced a water heater before and know how to do it. It was mostly a bunch of related stuff that went wrong that turned it into a day-and-a-half-long nightmare.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1h
I'm catching up on @qwantz.com, and this one hit a little close to home. Just last week I replaced our water heater, and thing after thing went wrong! It too was a nightmare start to finish!! www.qwantz.com/index.php?co...
Dinosaur Comics!
one might even say i'm doing this simply to avoid confronting the disaster that is now my bathroom but hahaha LET'S NOT
www.qwantz.com
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 3h
If you like this post, you are a turbo word nerd.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 3h
My Scrabble opponent just played FURZE, and I really wish I could respond with GORSE.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 7h
ENHANCE
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1d
theonion.com/trump-calms-...
Trump Calms Nerves Before Inaugural Address By Reminding Himself He’s The Only Person Who Actually Exists
WASHINGTON—Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath before making his way to the lectern, President Donald Trump reportedly calmed his nerves before his inaugural address Friday by reminding himself ...
theonion.com
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1d
Well, I pulled my CGEL off the shelf and did a little looking, but I wasn't able to find anything. (Though, really, how is anyone supposed to find anything in an 1,800-page book?)
arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 1d
I feel like I remember CGEL covering this, and I want to say that "rid" is a participial adjective in this construction.

But it's been a long time since I've looked at it, and I could be making this up.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Oof. It's always frustrating when you sign off on a proof and then the proofreader or typesetter decides to fiddle with it some more afterwards and introduces errors.
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
That is an absolutely justified and necessary change!
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
A very useful tip in case you've ever dealt with authors making changes behind your back 👇👇👇

bsky.app/profile/ches...
chestnutfez.bsky.social
Chestnutfez 🇨🇦 he/him @chestnutfez.bsky.social · 2d
My happiness levelled up a lot when I discovered you could lock a document when returning to the AU such that only tracked changes were allowed. (In Word)
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Live fast, die young, and leave a slightly disfigured corpse
arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
sorry to hear about your tertiary syphilis
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arrantpedantry.com
Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
And turning off Track Changes before you make your revisions is a great way to destroy trust with your copyeditor and production editor. It's literally our jobs to try to help you publish your stuff! Going behind our backs like this never helps anything.
bsky.app/profile/lloy...
lloyddavis.ca
Davis S. Pumpkinspice @lloyddavis.ca · 2d
Including spelling & factual errors i had marked for correction. On further examination I found he’d done some rewriting with change-tracking turned off. Time, effort, and the publisher’s money were wasted as we did another round of the author reviewing and me doing a final cleanup.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Yeah. You get a max of two for a parenthetical. Three makes a sentence descend into chaos.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Sometimes I push back and let them know that such extensive changes could jeopardize their release date, but sometimes it's easier to just keep quiet and make the changes.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Not really. I send the proof to the authors with some instructions about what they should look for, and sometimes they just go to town on it instead. By the time I get it back and it's covered in changes, it's a little late to say, "Hey, please don't do that."
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
On the one hand, it's the production staff's job to roll with the punches and try to make the talent happy. But sometimes I wish the talent would throw fewer punches.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
And, of course, if the changes require too much time to implement, it can threaten to push back a publication date.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Adding or deleting text can cause the text to reflow, so the typesetter needs to go back and smooth things out again. And what if you delete some text that had an indexed term in it? What if you add some text with a new index-worthy term in it? Now the index needs to be changed.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
Revised text needs to be copyedited again. Changes that are keyed in always run the risk of introducing errors. And if you're at the proofreading stage, changes can create problems for typesetting and indexing.
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Jonathon Owen @arrantpedantry.com · 2d
But it's also important to recognize that as production of a publication progresses, your window for making changes starts to close pretty rapidly. The later in the process it is, the more work you create for others.
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