--- On Wed, 12/17/08, Bonobashi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Everybody seems to have a favourite gripe, and that is
> clearly the only thing worth talking about. <snipped>
> For me, at the moment, it's imbeciles who write 'a
> history' instead of 'an history'.
Ah-ha! The mis-use of language - now that's a favourite gripe I can really get
behind.
In this case, though, ahem. 'A history' is correct. 'An history' is very
definitely not. The 'h' at the beginning of the word is not silent. If you are
nostalgic about my outbursts of linguistic pedantry on Silk, we can go into why
the 'h' in 'hour', 'honour' and 'honest' are silent, and why this is not the
case with 'history' or 'hippopotamus'. It will involve long and soporific
explanations involving word etyomology. Latin, Greek and French will be
invoked. You have been warned.
Permit me to offer up a favourite gripe of my own: the frequent use of
'decimate' to signify 'wipe out a large proportion of'. I know this has become
the commonly accepted meaning (due to widespread abuse in popular media), but
it's still a conscious effort not to go all Inigo Montoya (You keep using that
word. I do not think it means what you think it means.) when it catches me
unawares in the midst of the evening news. One would think the original meaning
('kill one in every ten') is perfectly obvious from the word root: decim-, as
in decimal, from the Latin for a tenth.
Let's not even get started about the phenomenon/phenomena thing.
cheers,
Divya
