There’s some truth to the stereotype that people who tweet, text, or otherwise engage in brief online communications often play fast and loose with rules of spelling, grammar, and other proper writing. But every rule has its exception, and the sudden popularity of “A Owl” (sic) as a Twitter trend looks like one of them.
At first glance, the bulk of tweets about the phrase either express anger at the error or wonder as to why it’s trending to begin with. Comments like “[W]hy is A Owl trending…that grammar is disgusting”, “Call me pedantic but it’s ‘AN owl’ not ‘A owl’,” and “A Owl Do I even want to know and isn’t it an owl anywhere” are extremely common.
But those who got the in-joke found it hilarious. The phrase “a Owl” comes from a British sitcom called PhoneShop. In fact, the owl joke is so popular, it has its own Facebook page.
“A Owl” comes from a scene wherein two men are sitting in a pub, and one is talking about an unexpected tattoo he found on his date’s body the night before. Over the next several seconds, the phrase is frequently repeated with a different inflection each time:
“A owl.”
“A owl?”
“A owl! On her back. Staring at me! Judging me.”
“A OWL?!”
The episode first aired in 2010, but only now did “A Owl” become a Twitter trend. Topsy shows that the phrase appeared over 5,000 times in the past week (compared to 80,000 hits for “all time”). But that number also includes obvious typos, like “I’d be amped af if a owl came to me with a hogwarts acceptance letter.”
This isn’t the first time an error spawned a Twitter trend. Three months ago, when baseball star Albert Pujols signed a deal with the Los Angeles Angels, many of his fans on Twitter were so excited, they misspelled the team’s name as “Angles,” and enough people noticed and laughed at the mistake to make it a trend in its own right.
The “A Owl” trend isn’t quite the same thing, since it’s based on a sitcom joke rather than an actual mistake, but many twitterers promoting the trend don’t seem to know this.
