Maybe we should come up with a new definition for that because bricked definitely means unrecoverable.

Why? That term will also change due to common usage over time

We lost the battle over “literally “ a decade ago and I’m not going to spend my time fighting a bunch of people who would rather scroll through 5 second videos all day than pick up a book.

So is it "a historic" or "an historic"? I've heard Stephen Colbert use "an historic" with a non-silent H.

Yes, this is an exception to the rule in British English, although possibly old-fashioned and becoming obsolete. Some British people put "an" before any word starting with "h" and longer than three syllables.

EDIT I'm wrong here - I don't think anyone ever says "an Halloween celebration" for example. But I was sure there were other "h" counterexamples than historic.

I asked Claude and it showed me various examples of other words that may well be preceded with "an", such as heroic, habitual, and hereditary. It's to do with how strongly the "h" is pronounced.

A related quirk is English people saying "an hotel" (pronounced an otel). It's a subset, and specifically more popular with English speakers as opposed to non-English British. Also, someone else claimed the English don't say "an historic" - incorrect. Again it's not universal.

This is a common overcorrection. It's 100% "a historic" if you're pronouncing the "h" (which everyone does).

People who say "an historic" are wrong - they're imagining there's some exception that there isn't.

You can easily tell they're wrong because who says "an history lesson"?

> because who says "an history lesson"?

People speaking dialects that don't pronounce the "h" in "history". Which used to be a lot more common when this rule was written down. I've heard several English dialects that pronounce "historian" like "istorian", and who would say "a istorian"?

English is full of obscure rules that were written down ages ago, often because one particular guy wrote down his personal preference and others accepted it as fact ("less" vs "fewer", for instance).

English speakers still can't agree whether the h in "herb" is pronounced or not. I don't see why anyone would be surprised that other words beginning with h are also subject to debate.

I said:

> if you're pronouncing the "h" (which everyone does).

You can say "an 'istoric", but that's not what we're talking about. The overcorrection is "an historic".

That also isn't specific to "historic", for example you can say "an 'ouse" but literally nobody says "an house".

> (which everyone does)

I don't think this is true. I'm pretty sure I don't ever pronounce the h in historical if I'm coming into it from "an." "Anistorical." The "i" takes care of the "h."

Also "a history" becomes "[ə:]istory" (but definitely not "an history") and "the historical" becomes "th[ə]istorical." Definitely no "h."

It gets dropped in other situations, too. "Speaking of wh[ə]distoricallyappened..." I can't be sure when I don't drop it, other than when the word is bare. Fairly boring black middle-class midwestern accent.

"a history lesson" and "an historic event" have different stress in the history area (or at least they can have, depending on the phrase context), and I think that explains it.

Saying "a historic event" requires you to pause and stress the start of historic (a + glottal stop + "his" + ...). It's a natural phrasing pattern to have the initial part of historic unstressed, and then the h is effectively dropped even if you're not speaking an h-dropping dialect; this way "an historic event" follows as correct.

We simplify a lot of sounds in unstressed parts of words, but because we know and "see" the spelling, our brains can keep the illusion of the whole word going for us.

Nope. A/an doesn't depend on where the stress in a word is.

The last time I went down this rabbit hole I concluded these are all correct with identical meaning in U.S. English:

  a historic
  a historical
  an historic
  an historical

for ESL people, its both.

For english people, as in actual english not from the UK, its a historic, unless its for emphasis.

There is/are some religious overtones, that are infused into this. Catholics used to (or still do) say "hay-tch" for h, where as non-Catholic would say "ay-tch". However that distinction is not so acute in england(unless you're in/near liverpool), but it might be in scotland and its certainly there in NI

It's interesting in NI because haitch-vs-aitch is so much more obvious than any of the other common shibboleths that it's become almost a comically exaggerated thing - something that people feel free to comment on or even joke about in a way that they wouldn't about anything else.

(Derry vs Londonderry might beat it for sheer obviousness, except for the fact that no-one, even the most hardened Unionist, actually calls it Londonderry in everyday speech unless they're making a point... or work for the BBC)

But, in reality, I think it originally comes from Hiberno-English vs Mid Ulster English, the two main dialects of English spoken in Ireland, rather than anything to do with religion. The association with religion came with the post-famine wave of emigration to Britain, and it was only after that that it began to filter back to Ireland.

(That's the story I was told at school, anyway...)

Aha, this is interesting, because I didn't know the origin of it. The only reason I'm really aware of it is because some of the children I look after go to a catholic school, and say haitch really obviously.

> even the most hardened Unionist, actually calls it Londonderry in everyday speech unless they're making

thick NI accent the SIX COUNTIES! (at this point I would then quickly withdraw to a safe distance and hope I haven't set off a riot.)

Comedians often make jokes.

Exactly the video I was expecting it to be. Same herd.

You've been here 8 years, so... you're just as much part of the same herd as me :-)

"Don't ask to ask, just ask"

Another site in fact https://dontasktoask.com/

Yes, but also Wordpress still exists and keeps the old ways of doing things.

Saying that a certain project exists that does not use newer features of a language does not detract from the fact that the language itself is much more featureful.

Im sure I could find popular projects in every language in the world which only uses old library functions and hasnt been updated. I would hazzard a guess that as node changes so frequently, there are untold amounts of projects still using old inefficient methods compared to what is available in the latest version

> other two famous Handmade languages

Jai and... C3? FilC?

Jai and C3. I do not consider FilC to be a distinct programming language. AIUI the C I wrote twenty years ago would work with Filip's approach, maybe it needs minor tweaks in a few cases (mmap stunts for example) but likely not for much of what I wrote.

They are probably nodding in agreement while management lives in its bubble.

I do not hate Firefox but I hate it when Mozilla uses my donation money in not Firefox.

The documentation is the most 0.x piece of Zig. It will come but it will take time.

Google has been boiling the frog for a long time with this one. I for one will keep using Firefox.

Last year, I moved back to Firefox after a decade or so exclusively on Chrome, which is something I'd been procrastinating about doing for some time.

It was mostly painless. Bookmarks were automatic. I had some extensions to reconfigure and some passwords to migrate to a different password manager.

I wished I'd gotten it over with sooner.

Code editors should do this visually without adding actual space characters to the file.

why not go even further?

store the source minified without any extraneous whitespace and let the editor display a properly indented view in your preferred style...

An AST-based code editor. That would be neat.