Huh! Weird English grammar thing I've never thought about before:

In the chant "Give me a {LETTER}", what are the rules about when you use "an" and when you use "a"? Because it's not just vowels versus consonants!

"Give me an T!" <- This is clearly wrong

"Give me a F!" <- But this is also clearly wrong???

"Give me an U!" <- This is very very wrong

I had to think about why this is for a bit, and here it is:

The answer

Those examples aren't "Give me a T!" or "Give me an F!" - they're "Give me a tee!" and "Give me an eff!". "Give me a yuu!". "Give me an aitch!" or "Give me a haitch!"


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in reply to @terrycavanagh's post:

My friend in college used to spell letters out when we were playing bananagrams because he had them and all the two letter words memorized. According to scrabble, letter spellings are generally valid

You're right, though! It's the normal a/an used in a context that you don't normally think about. Another one that trips me up regularly is when I have abbreviations that are often spoken as new words (e.g. F.L.Y.) and not knowing whether to encourage reading it as a word (a F.L.Y.) vs abbreviations (an F.L.Y.)

When I was leargning english, the teacher told me this was a stricly phonetic rule in order to set indefinite articles before nouns.

Don't look at the letter, hear the sound and you know how to write or say it (if it starts with a vocal, is an, otherwise its just a).

This also rings true with acronyms. Which is really annoying since it can't be deduced entirely from what you are writing.

I remember an even stranger rule, which is about adjectve ordering when describing an object. It's a is a very strict one, and its this:

  1. Opinion
  2. Size
  3. Age
  4. Shape
  5. Colour
  6. Origin
  7. Material
  8. Purpose

There is no true reason why, just thats how it is and how it feels correct (I believe that like everything there are expceptions though). If you mention adjectives in any other order, english natives will just feel it "wrong". Oh well, cute things languages have.