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I believe that strictly speaking h should be treated as a vowel at the beginning of a word, so "an historic occasion" is the correct usage.
You think English is a melting pot, we've got bits of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and even dialect words from French over here as a result of getting invaded even more than you lot!
(Ireland's history also means there are some quite interesting genetic diseases which are quite common over here but rare elsewhere in the world)
Fotched up reet, I were.
Then there’s the increasing misuse of words like infamous and epicentre. People seem to have decided that infamous means extra famous and epicentre is used for when people just mean centre. (Epi as in epidermis and meaning surface - hence the epicentre being the position on the surface above where the earthquake took place below the surface).
As for "when am I ready?" You'll never be ready. It works in reverse, you become ready by doing it. - pmbomb
I'd also bet that most people who get up on their high horse about other people using language incorrectly make "mistakes" that other prescriptivists would sneer down at from their own saddles.
N.B. I _do_ understand those funny little IPA symbols. I studied English philology, English grammar, phonetics and phonology for 4 years at University. At one time I could read most dialects of Middle English, and could have a pretty decent stab at Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. Once you get a little bit of perspective on the history of English, it's pretty hard to get annoyed about change.
Like most people, there _are_ things that annoy me,. But I try to be phlegmatic about it.
And 'til instead of the correct till. There is until and there is till. They mean the same thing, though they are spelled differently. Till is NOT a shortened version of until that requires an apostrophe. It's a word of its own which, according to my copy of the Shorter OED, has been around several hundred years longer than until, which was formed by adding the Old Norse 'und' to till.
Never understood why, to be honest (as, according to the same entry, till actually comes from the Old norse til, which existed before either of the ones above, but in modern English is spelled till, and never had an apostrophe), but that really grinds my gears, that one.