--- On Fri, 19/12/08, Divya Sampath <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Divya Sampath <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] Pet Peeves and Pedantry, was: How Risky Is India?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Friday, 19 December, 2008, 1:10 AM
> --- 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.
Warning noted.
However, I understand that the usage is linked to the origin of the word, not
so much to the pronunciation of the 'h' sound.
So, history, hotel, hospital being words of foreign origin, Greek, French and
French respectively, ought to be an history, an hotel and an hospital.
I do remember reading the exact rules of usage in some obscure tome or the
other, but having forgotten that you are around to haunt those who venture
forth into these well-charted waters but are unable to produce their letters of
marque, omitted, most unwisely, it would appear, to look it up before making
that very allusive remark in an otherwise general rant.
So I have the task of looking it up before the nuclear winter sets in...er,
that is, before you react.
>
> 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.
This, by the way, as you probably know already, was a specific Roman military
punishment for units found to be insufficiently courageous in battle. It was
literally the execution of one in ten.
Yes, it is a hateful misuse.
Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Go to
http://messenger.yahoo.com/invite/
