I hope you had a terrific Superb Owl day! What's that, you say? It's a day born from a typo that's turned into a way to celebrate how awesome owls are. Salon explains:
It's wordplay that has legs. Surprisingly long, slender legs with sharp, killing claws on the ends. It's Superb Owl, a typo of Super Bowl (running the B from "Bowl" onto "Super") — and the phrase has taken on a life of its own, rising from the depths of an internet joke to become a popular, actually lauded day.
But as far as online goes, the phrase Superb Owl can be traced back to at least 2008 when a user by the name of @shawnw tweeted, "Superb Owl party tonight!" The post only received three likes and two retweets. It was 2008, after all.
Three years later, in 2011, the subreddit /r/Superbowl was started with the rules: "(1) Image posts must contain an owl (2) Text posts must be about owls." It currently has over 400,000 members and is in the top 1% of reddit communities. Recent posts include a carving a user did of an owl out of white pine wood, and a closeup of a Barred Owl with the caption "1 of 6 Superbowls I saw last night."
The Salon piece goes on to trace how in 2014 Stephen Colbert popularized the day by featuring it on a segment and how in 2020 the day was featured on "What We Do in the Shadows." Since then it's been a big hit for various nature-focused groups such as the Sierra Club, the National Park Service, the Audobon Center for Birds of Prey, and National Geographic, among others. I don't know about you, but as someone who barely noticed that the "big game" was happening, I was delighted to see my social media feeds fill up with Superb Owls instead!
