AW1Steve
Posts: 14507
Joined: 3/10/2007 From: Mordor Illlinois Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: geofflambert So I went to Jury Duty and took a new book to start, Pacific Crucible. I know that lots of people think they're more literate than me (I learned this from Percy Dovetonsils) and Ian is probably one of them, but he used the following construction: "an history". Now we have both the word "a" and the word "an" for a reason. It's not because if you use the wrong one and step on a tile on the floor that causes you to fall into a dungeon. It's about sound. Some think that you use "an" before a vowel, and "a" before a consonant. I wonder if they know that "y" can be either one or the other? They are half right, but it matters not what letter was pressed in ink upon a piece of paper but what the sound is. It should in all cases be "a history" because in that case the "h" is most definitely a consonant. It should be "an hour" as the "h" in that case is silent, it is a mere ornament. This is so because the intercession of the "n" between two vowels helps one distinguish that there are two words, not one. For instance, "ahistorical" is a word but what does it sound like? It means 'not historical' and we pronounce the 'a', "not", as a short a, whereas when we say "a historical" we pronounce the the "a" as a long a. I always run into people who disagree for some unintelligible reason but as soon as I'm done smiting AW1Steve I will be Emperor of the Earth and everyone will have to do as I say and think as I tell them to. Now I ran into an interesting quote in Toll's book from an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle not long after the Great San Francisco Earthquake referencing difficulties finding school infrastructure for children and considerations about, let's say, the rationing of the available resources vis-a-vis immigrant children. The SF Chronicle was a Hearst newspaper and you may know that he was the inspiration for "Citizen Kane". He was also a very bad boy at times, a rabble-rouser, militarist and nationalist. The quote is "Japan sent us not her fittest, but her unfittest; she has sent us the scum that has collected up on the surface of the boiling waters of her new national life, the human waste material for which she herself can find no use." Sounds eerily familiar but I can't place it at the moment. When your done smiting me? Dude , I'll be in a nursing home before you launch a single electron! Is this some kind of pathetic lizard trash talk? Admit it, you know I'm going to destroy you! You know it, and your just green with envy!
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