A historic is 100% correct

Nice try. Here's the correct link.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...thing=3&share=

"A historic" is used in books 4.5x as much as "an historic", in America. In other words, over 80% of the time.

I doubt if you'll find any other grammatical so-called error used 20% of the time.

When did "in America" become the gold standard for English?

What that shows, of course, is that it's an older, and British, use. But that's the point: that it is not "an error."

Here's ngram for "heroic" for the same parameters.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...thing=2&share=

"An hotel" was more common in Victorian prose than "a hotel"

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...thing=2&share=

The change in which one was preferred comes in 1930.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...thing=2&share=

But "an hotel" continues to be found ...

1776

I before E tho.

glad I didn't make my 'when we won the war' post before seeing this.

(Wait...)

I'm glad I did not make my 'When we won the war.' post prior to seeing this one.

America has 15X more people than your silly country. Majority rules, bro.

Having grown up in your country (and your state, for that matter), I'll resist responding to the inane nationalism of this "mine is bigger than yours" rhetoric and remind you that the point of this current debate was whether the use of "an" before certain words was an error. My argument has simply been that while something may be anomalous in US usage, that doesn't make it universally wrong.

And I don't think America does have the majority of English speakers world-wide. In any case, American English isn't the standard of world-wide English. (There isn't one.)

Sorry, "bro".

And the original post claiming incorrectness referred specifically to American English.

No. This is the original post.

You answered by limiting it to American English. My point remains: there are other Englishes. It was the original post I was responding to, trying to suggest that getting "really" bugged by a form that is valid at other times and in other places is a silly waste of time.

As this debate has become, I guess.

If you don't follow American English you should smoke a bloody ***.

And if we didn't follow American English *** wouldn't be censored, would it?

I win!

Change the ngram graph to be from 1800 to present, and look separately at American and British English. The trend is clear in each dialect (not really dialect, I realize, but I'm not sure what word to use here), it's just earlier in American English. ("A historic" pulls ahead for good in American English in 1936, in British English in 1965.)

That it's more common doesn't make it correct, of course, and I'm sure we could find quite a few of what we in this thread would generally consider "errors" that are more common than the correct version (fun challenge, actually...). But add that to the style manuals, which as far as I can tell universally recommend "a historic" for American and British speakers, and I think it's about as clear as an evolving linguistic construct can get these days. "A historic" is correct; if you won't admit that "an historic" is incorrect by most definitions, at least observe that we have tons of evidence that people will look at you funny when you say it that way.

I'm pretty sure I've used "an historic" before but agree that "a historic" is correct.

I think I just heard professors using the "an" and picked it up that way. Proving you don't always learn good things in college, I guess.

Is it better to pronounce a long a or as a schwa

Speaking of pedantic.

Good call. We wouldn't want pedantry in the grammar nit thread of all places.

Someone help me with a word I'm thinking of. Whenever I think of pedantic, I think of someone who is dumb but trying to sound smart; like in that one scene from Good Will Hunting. What is a word for that?

But yeah, dude sounds like that.

Malaprop?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/34...-same-1347314/

GOLD

So, usually the New York Times is pretty good with copyediting, but...

Source (emphasis added)

I can't believe this would actually be in their house style guide, could it? It's repeated several times throughout the article so it wasn't a "typo."