On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:10 AM, Divya Sampath <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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.
This is what we were taught in school -- but that is not the whole story. *
Both* 'a history' and 'an history' are correct. 'An history' fell out of
fashion in the 20th century, but was the norm before that -- and has made a
bit of a comeback recently. The London Times stylebook, in fact, requires
'an' to be used before words like 'hotel', 'historic' and 'heroic'. Do a
Google search for books with 'an history' in the title, you'll see what I
mean.
This is actually a fairly old controversy, and I've read dozens of articles
on this over the years, articulating both positions convincingly. In any
case, both usages are legitimate.
> 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.
Language evolves. According to Mirriam-Webster [1] and WordNet [2],
'decimate', like so many other words, has an accepted second meaning.
MW says: "**to reduce drastically especially in number <cholera
*decimated*the population>
b*:* to cause great destruction or harm to <firebombs *decimated* the city> <an
industry *decimated* by recession>"
Wordnet says: "(v) eliminate, annihilate, extinguish, eradicate, wipe out,
decimate, carry off (kill in large numbers) "the plague wiped out an entire
population"
So you may not like how the word has evolved, but the evening newscaster who
uses it in that sense is absolutely correct.
**
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate
[2] http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=decimate
--
Amit Varma
http://www.indiauncut.com
