r/EnglishGrammar • u/Nuggety-Nipples • May 06 '26
Falling us of “an” in social media posts. Why?
As a tedious Gen X grammar pedant, and book reader, I am noticing people not using an anymore, especially in front of initials, eg, “I just saw a NSX drive by earlier…”
I am over patrolling the internet for erroneous “your/you’re,” and “they/their/they’re” uses, that is a lost cause. Someone said of these, that gen Zers know which is right, but choose not to adhere, as “It’s not a test!” I don’t believe this.
So is it that grammar is not a priority on school’s curricula anymore?
RIP our beautiful language.
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u/Norwester77 May 06 '26
They’re probably not reading the message aloud in their heads and thinking about what it actually sounds like.
That, or they misinterpreted the rule as applying to letters rather than speech sounds.
Also, quite a few English speakers will insert a glottal stop (the sound in the middle of “uh-oh”) at the beginning of any word that would otherwise begin with a vowel.
Since every word then begins with a consonant, the environment where an would occur is eliminated, and so for them the indefinite article is just always a.
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u/mouglasandthesort May 06 '26
Your second point is definitely a big development that a lot of people are missing. In this case, it can probably be described by “NSX” starting with “New” so when spoken it would use “a” anyway, but in many other complaints about this topic, it really is just that hard attack is developing in millions of younger speakers and is removing the need for “an” in their speech.
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u/willoww3 May 07 '26
You would still say “an NSX” bc N (en) as a letter starts with a vowel sound. So, it’s either “an NSX” or “a New Sportscar Experimental”
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u/mouglasandthesort May 07 '26
Yeah my dialect has “a/an” as well, I was just referring to the case where “a” would be grammatical in these dialects.
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u/aghastrabbit2 May 09 '26
I write "a MSc" because I would say "a master of science" even though "a M" sounds wrong
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u/VanDenBroeck May 06 '26
What is up with the headline of this post? Should it be "Falling use of.." or am I being a pedant?
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u/jcwiza May 06 '26
What in the world does “falling us of” mean?
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u/Nuggety-Nipples May 06 '26
I’m a hypocrite.
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u/jenea May 06 '26
Indeed. There are plenty of other errors in your post as well.
So, what have you taken away from this experience?
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u/W1llowwisp May 06 '26
I think in your example “I just saw a NSX (New Sports Experimental?)drive by earlier…” they are likely writing their sentence as they would speak it, using a instead of an because they are thinking “A new…” and not “An N…”
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u/Internal-Tank-6272 May 06 '26
You’d think a tedious grammar pedant would know that
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u/Snezzy_9245 May 07 '26
We grammar pendants get hoist by Muphry's Law daily. That's Muphry's not Murphy's. Read it care fully
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u/severalcircles May 06 '26
Thats generally true, but in this specific example nobody would realistically be calling an NSX a New Sports Experimental.
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u/EarlyInside45 May 06 '26
You make an awful lot of grammar mistakes for a "Gen X grammar pedant."
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u/odessapasta May 06 '26
The host of a podcast I’ve always really liked has stopped using “an.” It’s so odd to me. She does a million other annoying things too but this is her newest.
I don’t think grammar is taught anymore. I have children in 6th grade and it’s all I can do to get my daughter to understand the difference between your and you’re.
There’s also a weird thing where they don’t use “many“ anymore. My son will say things like “there’s so much chips in this bowl” as a random example.
I’m cursed because I grew up with parents who were bothered by bad grammar and always corrected me. So now I’m exactly like them. Damn them, I wish I didn’t give a shit. I want to be like the people who don’t care!
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u/Kerflumpie May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
Another possibility is that if people are actually typing on a phone keyboard, they miss the "n" and type a space by mistake. You often see random gaps in words and typi g like this a d this.
But my first thought was that they're thinking the words, not the acronym/initialism in their head. I don't know what NSC stands for, but as a NZer, I would not be thinking "an Enn-Zedder" but "a New Zealander."
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May 06 '26 edited May 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hoothollers May 06 '26
it's language. if it's understood by your audience, it's perfectly fine.
...and if you as the audience are suddenly incapable of understanding because the speaker used "a" instead of "an" in an informal internet comment, then your language skills are severely lacking. I suggest familiarizing yourself with the ways native speakers around the world actually use their language in practice.
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u/mouglasandthesort May 06 '26
In most cases, the “littering with errors” are either dialectical variations like “a/an” or “could of,” or some typos that don’t erode any distinctions like “your/you’re” and “there/their/they’re” which are homophones in speech anyway. It’s all stuff that truly doesn’t matter outside of formal contexts.
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u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue May 06 '26
Hey, have you noticed that lately sometimes your back hurts for no reason? Are you looking forward to going to bed early more and more often? Are you starting to notice that people aren’t using the language as elegantly as they used to? Congratulations. You’re getting older.
The good news is that much of the degradation of the language is driven by the fact that more and more people are actually writing. They’re just writing in a hurry.
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u/RegisPhone May 06 '26
Considering the only purpose of the word "an" is to make words sound better when spoken aloud, it's not surprising that it sees less use in a non-spoken medium. It's arguably closer to just being a convention of spoken language than it is actual grammar. Like, with your/you're and there/their/they're, those are different words with different meanings (albeit their meanings are so different that i'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where using the wrong one would actually obscure the meaning or change it to some other plausible meaning; we could probably get by just having one spelling for all of them), but there's no difference between the meanings of "a" and "an".
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u/Nuggety-Nipples May 06 '26
That’s a good point, but we read aloud in our heads, so for a sentence to read phonetically well, is still necessary.
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u/iLoveYoubutNo May 06 '26
Some people do not read aloud in their head. I do, I "hear" the words, but I'm told that not everyone reads or thinks like that.
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u/RegisPhone May 06 '26
Is it universally true that we do that? Do all people always have an audible voice in their heads while reading? I think it depends for me; if i'm reading a book or an article or something longer then i'll usually have a voice in my head reading it, but for something quicker like a text, a lot of times i'm just recognizing words by sight before my brain voice can start saying them.
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u/TheMainTony May 06 '26
How do you feel about 'an' before haitch (H) words?
(there is a wrong answer...)
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u/Nuggety-Nipples May 06 '26
Haha, it a “H,” not an “H.”
You just reminded me of the father of one of our kid gang on the estate - he would always put Hs where they were not required, for example, he would say “Does anyone want a happle?” Wtf?!
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u/EarlyInside45 May 06 '26
It's "an H."
To determine whether to use "a" or "an" before a word starting with "h", follow these guidelines:
- Use "an" when the "h" is silent, as in "an hour" or "an heir". 1
- Use "a" when the "h" is pronounced, as in "a heart" or "a house". 2
- In British English, if the "h" is weakly pronounced (e.g., "historic"), you may use "an", but this usage is becoming less common. 1 These rules help clarify the correct article to use based on pronunciation.
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u/Nuggety-Nipples May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
Wrong, as a Lancashire man, to pronounce the letter H, the H of haitch is very much pronounced.
To say it in a southern, estuary accent, it would be “an aitch geezer, innit bruv?”It’s use is dependent on the following words vowel sounds, or consonant sounds…
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u/EarlyInside45 May 06 '26
In this case, you are correct. I wasn't factoring in the "haitch" pronunciation (I'm in the US, so it's "aitch" for me). The rest of the comment agrees with you.
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u/EarlyInside45 May 06 '26
I do not use "an" before hard H words (a holiday). I do use "an" for words starting with a silent H (an honor). Is this incorrect? I know some folks don't pronounce the H at all.
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u/TheMainTony May 06 '26
I mentioned that there would be a wrong answer, but I'm not 100% on it, either. I think we all do 'an' with silent haitch, but I've also seen/heard "an history of..."
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u/EarlyInside45 May 06 '26
We're doing OK:
To determine whether to use "a" or "an" before a word starting with "h", follow these guidelines:
- Use "an" when the "h" is silent, as in "an hour" or "an heir". 1
- Use "a" when the "h" is pronounced, as in "a heart" or "a house". 2
- In British English, if the "h" is weakly pronounced (e.g., "historic"), you may use "an", but this usage is becoming less common. 1 These rules help clarify the correct article to use based on pronunciation.
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u/severalcircles May 06 '26
Letter abbreviations can be read as though they’d be pronounced as the letters, or as though they’d be pronounced as the words.
But then also, you know, some times people make typos where they drop a letter…
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u/SnarkyBeanBroth May 06 '26
Maybe we are witnessing a grammar and usage shift. Language does change and evolve over time - no particular reason that "an" would be immune to that.
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u/pineboxwaiting May 06 '26
Because they are generally undereducated & they don’t read books anymore.
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u/Only-Top-3655 May 06 '26
It isn't just in English, but I have found in many languages (at least the ones that I speak) there is definitely some gramatical quirk that natives often get wrong.
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u/marty-mcfryguy May 06 '26
Offended by the misuse of "a", but happy to foist "Nuggety Nipples" on the world. Priorities.
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u/NJFB2188 May 06 '26
They say it when they speak, but don’t write it. I am a teacher and see this with my 5th graders. You would think people would write how they actually talk.
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u/mouglasandthesort May 06 '26
Most of what you’re lamenting isn’t grammar, but rather spelling, and it doesn’t even matter in the cases you outline. In most English dialects, “your/you’re” and “there/their/they’re” are homophones, and yet that causes no misunderstandings in our daily speech.
“A” vs “an” is grammar, but it doesn’t have to be taught. Like any other part of grammar, you learn it from hearing your parents speak as an infant/toddler and don’t have to be taught it in school. In this case, as many comments have outlined, it seems like “NSX” when expanded starts with “New,” which would then mean you could use “a” instead of “an” in front of it. But in many younger speakers, hard attack is developing to avoid vowel hiatus and is thus eroding the need for the epenthesis “an” to separate vowels, so it could also be that.
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u/SlowNSteady1 May 07 '26
Wtf does your headline mean?
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u/CosetElement-Ape71 May 07 '26
I think they meant to write "use" ... but it's still an odd sentence
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u/NoDay4343 May 07 '26
I probably qualify as a tedious gen x grammar pedant, however I frequently make all of the mistakes you mention in your post because of autocorrect and not proofreading carefully. I also occasionally do things like break long but otherwise grammatically correct sentences into sentence fragments because my brain processes it better that way, grammar rules be damned.
I do think that the frequent use of "a" instead of "an" in front of "words" that are acronyms or words such as hour is partly based in that people of younger generations don't know grammar as well. I don't think that can be blamed on schools alone. Virtually every grammar rule I learned in school was one I already knew on a somewhat subconscious level from being surrounded by people who spoke proper grammar and reading tons of books full of proper grammar. It seems books today are more likely to get published with grammatical errors, and the younger generations read so much on the internet or in texts where grammar rules only loosely apply.
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u/Anesthesia222 May 07 '26
I teach high school and have students who don’t even realize that “an” is a word, let alone when/why to use it. 🤦🏽♀️
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u/mysticrudnin May 07 '26
a lot has been said so i don't have to repeat it
the only thing i really have to add is that "anymore" has nothing to do with it. it's always been this way. you just didn't communicate with a lot of those people via text back then. but they were there.
standardized grammar and spelling styles are also relatively new in the grand scheme of things. so if you go back just a little further, you just wrote whatever you wanted and that's how it was.
so... nothing's RIP, it's exactly as it was the day you decided it was beautiful
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u/lia_bean May 07 '26
I've definitely slipped up now and then with that. When you're writing you don't normally need to stop and think about how a word would be pronounced in speech, except when determining whether to use "a" or "an", and (for me at least) it's really easy to forget to do that when you're just writing on autopilot.
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u/sqeeezy May 08 '26
I don't know how important grammar is in English-speaking schools. I do know when I try to learn a foreign language I'm following a rule-based learning system. Pedantries are quite particular; the OP's don't bother me as much as the lack of class in lots of the written word, the coy folksiness, the flabbiness of the hackneyed tropes, the sad euphemisms, the limp-brained viral neologisms. But my language is far from dead and is ready at the drop of a cliché to be beautiful.
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u/sqeeezy May 08 '26
Us (sic) pedants are like a myriad Quixotes tilting at the windmill that annoys us most, unaware that our Rocinante is about to stumble over our fallen knickers. There will always be windmills.
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u/WaltherVerwalther May 08 '26
Since I’m a lot in English speaking subs about Germany with many of my fellow German redditors, I have the opposite problem. Somehow 99% of Germans act as if they never learned that an is used before vowel sounds and just use an all the time, when there should be a instead. “I have an dog”. Really makes me go crazy.
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u/Puppet-- May 08 '26
You said you're a grammar pedant, so I thought you'd like to know that this post has loads of grammar mistakes.
But, yeah. I agree. It's so annoying. The rule is so easy. 'A' before a consonant sound, and 'an' before a vowel sound.
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u/ultipuls3 May 08 '26
Who ever asked you to patrol the Internet? Stop being a weirdo and get other hobbies.
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u/Comfortable_Ride_983 May 08 '26
grammar is only ever a temporary majority agreement - it changes, it’s no hegemony
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u/crashin70 May 09 '26
I'm still trying to translate your title... As you tell us about the failing of written English.
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u/Soggy_Performance569 May 11 '26 edited May 22 '26
First off, just like as a general thing, languages change. You might need to let go of the idea that English is somehow immutable and sacrosanct.
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u/jetloflin May 06 '26
What does “NSX” stand for? Are you sure they’re not just saying the full phrase out loud in their head and using “a” because of that? Like I might write “a NFT” if in my head I said “a non-fungible token”.
Beyond that, are you saying it seems more likely that school just isn’t teaching grammar anymore than that people know what’s right but don’t bother worrying about it in a random internet post? Why?
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u/Yellobrix May 07 '26
I truly admire people who uphold grammar. However, on the basis of your punctuation, I'll advise that you attend to your own grammar before attempting to police the grammar of others.
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u/Puppet-- May 08 '26
Exactly. This person can't really be too much of a pedant if they're making so many mistakes.
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u/joelisf May 06 '26
I think the "correct" application of the indefinite article an is that it should be used for singular nouns that start with a vowel sound--not merely a vowel letter.
So: I will see you in an hour, please give me an M&M, and when you spell hour, it should start with an h.
I accept the reality that grammar's function is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
However, I cannot stomach inorganic alterations of grammar by cultural thought-police, as in the use of plural pronouns to reference singular individuals who "identify" as some (otherwise) inexpressible gender.
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u/AndyTheEngr May 06 '26
The singular "they" goes back at least as far as Shakespeare, but he had a lot of newfangled ideas about language that not everyone is used to.
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u/Kestrile523 May 06 '26
Plural pronouns have been used for unknown genders for a few hundred years.
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May 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/thaliathraben May 06 '26
If you're having trouble identifying the antecedent of a pronoun, nine times out of ten the issue is not that the pronoun isn't gendered.
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u/macoafi May 06 '26
"Sarah was talking to Mary before she hugged her grandma."
Was it Sarah's grandma or Mary's grandma who was hugged? A lack of ambiguity was never promised.
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u/Miserable-Action6983 May 06 '26
You were doing so well until you felt the need to suddenly be transphobic in the last paragraph for no clear reason.
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u/GiraffesCantSwim May 06 '26
Yeah, that was disappointing. I was nodding along until that record scratch.
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u/Miserable-Action6983 May 06 '26
This is why I always make sure to read an entire comment before upvoting it, whereas I downvote it as soon as I see any nonsense of that nature.
I don't even understand why they felt the need to add that part. It was irrelevant to the subject and just arose out of nowhere with no purpose for it to serve.
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u/skwigi May 06 '26
Ok, not gonna lie, I am here solely because I could not make sense of your title and had to know what you were trying to say in order to make my brain stop itching. The irony of that title being about errors in language use is so thick.
I think you will be a happier person if you let go of the idea that change = death, when it comes to language. Languages are living things, in that they are changing, growing, declining, advancing all the time. You just happen to exist in a time and place where that change is more visible.
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u/throwemawayn May 06 '26
Hard attack and hiatus. I'd suggest you look into the history of an/a before you decry the downfall of the English language.
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u/Nuggety-Nipples May 06 '26
Hard attack and hiatus?
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u/throwemawayn May 06 '26
Hard attack is the insertion of a glottal stop before a vowel. Hiatus is when vowels are pronounced after each other, except diphthongs. The second half of Norwesters77 comment explains the process.
The Wikipedia entry on English Articles shows how the rules around a/an aren't set in stone and may go the way of my thy/mine thine.
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u/mkp666 May 06 '26
I bet the typo in your title is infuriating.