Wel, two things:
1- there is no such “rule”, there are no “rules” of American English, other than “is it in common usage” and “is it readily understandable”. Unlike France, the USA has no governing board controlong the rules of grammar, etc. There are style guides, but they disagree with one another. And many have turned to the “usage rule” which is what I use.
Although it is pronounced that way, it is not written that way. If you say it out loud, “an euphemism” sounds wrong, but when you see it in print- n*ot so much.
There may not be enforceable rules, and i agree that common usage changes over time, and that it can, in turn, change what is considered to be correct grammar and usage.
But there are rules in the sense that speaking a certain way will make you sound like an uneducated buffoon or a pretentious idiot. Also, your alleged “common usage” as it applies to the current case is pretty lame. Your own example shows less than 5% of Google results with “an euphemism” compared to “a euphemism.” I’m Ron Burgundy achieved over 300,000 results for “an year.” Would you accept that as appropriate usage?
If someone said or wrote “an euphemism,” would i understand what they meant? Sure. And, unless they were a close personal friend or one of my students, i wouldn’t attempt to correct them. In that sense, it’s not especially problematic. But, in addition to your argument about what is “readily understandable,” speech is also about facilitating communication, and if you speak or write in ways that don’t conform to what your listener or reader is expecting, and that are jarring to the ear or to the eye, you reduce the coherence of what you’re saying, and make life more difficult.
I don’t have much time for strict prescriptivists, who want every piece of grammar and usage carved in stone for all eternity, never to be altered or adjusted to suit changing usage patterns. But while the rules of grammar and usage can impede communication when followed blindly by hidebound prescriptivists, they can also aid communication when followed by people with common sense. The fact is that some things sound better than others, and work better than others, the whining of petulant radical descriptivists notwithstanding.
Fine. Let’s try using your “written rather than spoken” criteria with the example so thoughtfully provided by Rhythmdvl:
I stayed at a hotel once, where, in support of an union’s protest, Tiny Tim went on a hour-long jam about an unicorn. It was a honor to hear what that man could do with an ukulele, all in support of a worker’s rights to a honest day’s pay. I wonder if he needed an uvula replacement after that?
Try applying your method to all your posts on the SDMB from now on, and see how well it facilitates communication for you.
Read OK to me, did you have problems understanding it? Did it make your eyes water, or your brain hurt? But does anyone here write in such a clearly wrong way? Would anyone post here and ask if that’s proper grammar?
Look, if someone writes their prose without Caps (getting hwaaaay too common now :mad: ) or without paragraphs; then yes, it is hard to read, hard to understand and it makes my brain hurt and my eyes cross. But for me- and I suspect for most dudes- “an euphemism” is somethng your eyes slide right over without a pause.
Pretty much, whenever a poster comes here and has to ask “which is right?”- then both are OK. It’s only when it is so obviously wrong that no literate dude of average + IQ has to ask in the first place- is there an issue. Or “a issue”.
Which of these attitudes should one adopt when deciding whether or not to write in such a manner. After all, by the crtieria you’ve already set up, if it reads OK, then by definition it can’t be clearly wrong, because there are no rules except what reads OK.
Beats me, but if they did, wouldn’t you tell them that it was fine, based on the arguments you’ve offered in this thread?
Folks, it’s useless to argue with DrDeth on the issue of whether a particular grammar usage is “wrong.” He doesn’t accept the notion of prescriptive grammar in the use of English in America. Fortunately (perhaps), his viewpoint is not commonly accepted; unfortunately (perhaps), his viewpoint is gaining wider acceptance among this younger, IMing, texting generation that thinks it’s fine as long as it “makes sense.”
Much more compelling in the way of an arguement against his reasoning was the citation that “an year” turned up over 300,000 hits on Google, and I don’t think even DrDeth would consider “an year” something that shouldn’t be blue penciled. I note that there was no comment from DrDeth in response to that piece of evidence; selective failure to see what is actually a good arguement against, perhaps?
That’s one of those cases where, IMO, there really is room for either usage, depending upon how much emphasis one puts on the h at the beginning of the word.
Interestingly, English usage guides, like the most recent edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (ed. R.W. Burchfield) recommend “an historical.” An American usage guide, Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, says that:
Even more interestingly, Garner notes that the 1926 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, written by Fowler himself, “advocated a before historic(al) and humble.” It seems that the current preference for an in Fowler’s is the new editor, Burchfield’s, contribution to the volume.
Not very compeling at all, if you see it in context:
“*a year ago” or “an year ago” ? - WordReference Forums
The whole idea of this “rule” was to make pronunciation easier, i.e. it is easier to say “a year ago” than “an year ago”, as it is “an hour ago” than "a …
*
*“an year” VS “a year”
General English Grammar Questions - We answer lots of different types of general English questions here. *-
Yahoo! Answers - If the day, Month an year are all the same number …
21 answers - Yahoo! Answers - If the day, Month an year are all the same number ie 07/07/07 what is it called?
An year has passed! « Chrono Tron >> World Wide Weblog
An year has passed! 26 12 2006. I really can’t believe it but it’s been one full year since Chrono … Hey btw, its ‘A year’ and not ‘An year’ right? :? …
Of the first few, most are using “an year” as an example of bad grammar.
Another is a typo, it was clearly supposed to be “and year”. “An year” is a pretty easy typo for “and year” or “any year”.
Four are apparently translated from another language, apparently by a bot.
In other words, 9 out of 10 aren’t really someone typing “an year” thinking it is correct. Bad translating bot, typos and examples. Not grammar errors.
In none of my 1st page of Google searches is “an euphemism” used as an example of bad grammar, nor is it a clear typo. I suspect one of being a bad translation bot, however.
Quoting Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (bolding mine):
I don’t get this one – who says an “oo-manitarian” or 'uh-manitarian"? Even if you don’t (or just barely do) pronounce the h, wouldn’t you still say “a yoo-manitarian”, thus bringing the argument back to the “semivowel treated as consonant” example?
Indeed, it does. By page 10 of the “an year” results, you get an entire page of “an year” used as if it is grammatically correct. Indeed, most of the bottom of the first page of results uses “an year” as if grammatically correct, and is not questioning the contrast in usage.
So, quite frankly, you are out on a limb that has a very precarious and tenuous relationship with the tree.
Some people hear the words in their heads when they read; others don’t. I suspect you may be among the latter. But if your brain automatically pronounces the words in your head as you read, the kind of thing in that example (“an union,” “a honest,” etc.) is going to be jarring. So, yes, it does make my brain hurt.
I agree. “An euphamism” is jarring to me, as well, and make me mentally hiccup while reading. It’s certainly more disturbing to me than reading prose written in all-lowercase, although slightly better than prose without paragraphs.
There’s nothing wrong with descriptivism (and I’m normally on the descriptivist side of debates if you check my posting history–arguing for things like “I could care less” and “literally” used as an intensifier for both real and hyperbolic statements), but every single style guide would tell you that “a euphamism” is the only “correct” way to write this phrase. I would consider “an euphamism” as non-standard English and, therefore, incorrect in formal context.
This, too, is an important part of the discussion.
There are things i wouldn’t care about in an informal setting like everyday conversation or this message board, but that i would find inappropriate in a Wall Street Journal article, and that i would correct in an essay by one of my students,
DrDeth is the first person I’ve ever seen arguing that English doesn’t have rules. Most folks accept that it does; the question is just whence they come. A prescriptivist might argue that rules come from dictionaries, or grammar teachers, or some other such authoritarian source. A descriptivist, however, still recognizes the rules, but sees them as arising from common usage. If I write “The ball the bat with the hit batter bat” instead of “The batter hit the ball with the bat”, what I write is wrong, since it doesn’t follow the rules of English grammar. Those rules didn’t come from some old guy with a long white beard and a longer list of academic credentials, but they’re rules nonetheless, and I’ve broken them.
The a/an distinction is an interesting one, at this point in time. The reason for that rule stems from the fact that language is primarily a spoken form of communication, with the written form being secondary. So word choice should be based on the sounds of the words, not their written forms. But in our current environment of text messaging and the like, the written word is becoming increasingly common compared to the spoken form, and there are some new words being added to the language (for instance, “pwn”), which have a very clear and consistent spelling, but whose pronounciation is uncertain. One could, for instance, ask which of the following is correct: “I gave him such a pwning”, or “I gave him such an pwning”. If “pwn” is pronounced like “pawn”, or something similar, then the first would be correct, but if it’s pronounced like “own”, then the second is-- but nobody’s sure which it is.
