AN HISTORICAL EW!

@Background Pony #54E8  
Exactly; “an ‘istorical” works, “an historical” doesn’t.

@Fummy  
Some British accents don’t pronounce the H, hence the “an”. It remains completely incorrect if the H sound is audible.

@Fummy  
Yes it is, and a bunch of posh gits butchering their own native language doesn’t magically make it grammatically correct.

For those who don’t get it below. Saying “an” before a “h” word isn’t wrong, its common in upper class English.

Oh thank God, someone else notices when TV writers do this.
 
Repeat after me: “An” is only to be used before words that begin with a vowel sound. No real person talks like this. IF THE H ISN’T SILENT NORMALLY, IT SHOULD NOT BE SILENT HERE.
 
You got that? Good. Now you’re qualified to write dialogue.

@Minus  
Not sure what distinction you’re making here. How can you tell when someone’s intent is to be “technically correct” and when they are (according to you) actually being correct in using “an” to improve flow, clarity, and sound?  
And I don’t know what you mean by “no one here actually ever speaks like that,” as I hear this used by BBC radio announcers and newsreaders all the time. (Also, not sure where “here”is for you, but I take it to be the UK or a Commonwealth country.)

People who try to sound smart by talking like this because it’s “technically correct”, just make themselves appear very stupid. Or not natively English. No-one here actually ever speaks like that.
 
“An” exists to make saying certain words flow better, be clearer, and sound nicer. So quit abusing it!

@Muffinshire  
Agreed as in character usage

I loved how Rarity used “an historical” - it’s so perfectly in-character for her.

this is correct gramatical usage, op is just being a duck

It’s just Rarity speaking in an affected manner as usual. Why is this a macro?

@vonPeterhof  
Oh…..flippin’ ’eck!

I live in Australia and in my experience reporters on tv always say “an historic occasion”, and everytime they do it irritates me because it doesn’t sound right to me.
 
So yeah, anyone wanting to be “correct” will say “an”, but most people use “a” regardless.

@vonPeterhof  
@Stricken  
And then there’s the ironic twist of adding an H in the name of the letter and calling it “Heych.” :P
 
 
@Zennistrad  
It’s technically not, unless you pronounce it as “’istory,” which is technically an incorrect pronunciation, actually actually. :P

@vonPeterhof  
And then you have people who want to sound posh, or at least not common and uneducated, who don’t know the difference and pronounce the H at the beginning of every word regardless.

@The Floor Kippers  
I think you’re confusing vowels with silent letters. And no, the silent h is a more recent development in English, although it represents two separate phenomena. One is the borrowing of French words with silent h’s (like “honest”), and the other is the dropping of the h-sound in all words in certain British dialects, most notably working class London.

This is technically correct usage, actually.

@JaggedCarpet  
I should add, though, that that’s not true in every case, but it is in this one.

Actually, both “A” and “AN” are correct when the next word starts with an “H”.

@Ponylooker  
Like the words skirt and shirt.

As in French, the letter H used to be a vowel in the English language, less so these days, but the French still treat it as such.

Hotly disputed in some circles. Pretentious speakers and news organizations often use “an historic”. There was a pronunciation shift; at one point it made sense.

English is my second language and I know that “AN” goes with a word with a vowels and “A” with consonants.