The Virtual Gigolo

This is clearly an historic occasion, my first (and quite possibly only) post about the wonders of English grammar. I know this is a fairly dull subject, but this is a fairly dull blog, so all is well suited. The big question here is “are you mad? Surely you should have written ‘a historic’”. Actually, a second one is should that full stop have gone inside the quotes or not?

Addressing the first question. Clearly this is a matter of opinion, simply because some people prescribe prescriptive grammar, and others merely describe grammar, or prescribe that it should be described, or some such construction. The point is anyway you will always have a subset of the population who claim it does not matter! Frankly, they have a point, but let us leave that one be for now.

Really they, should we be using “an historic” or should we be using “a historic”. Some say that we should follow the “an before vowel” rule, although this breaks down heavily in cases such as “an hour”… “Ah, but that’s not a vowel!” I hear cried. Clearly this is indeed the case, and so many people then prefer the indication of whether a or an should be used to be based more on the presence of a “vowel sound” at the beginning of the word. Actually you can probably see that this also leads to problems, because different dialects pronounce words differently. Many Americans seem to suggest that only the British use “an historic” because all we Brits want to look like we are better… clearly flawed as Americans often feel it is right to use “an historic” as well (so I think in this case nationality based insults are unnecessary). Another suggestion is that is it based on the British trait of silencing the h on many such words, which is a fairly likely historical reason, though in recent times is a somewhat minority approach to pronunciation (it’s ‘istoric, innit? – though they probably would not know to use the ‘ in that anyway).

Some reason discussion I have read has suggested that a better approach than “vowel sounds” is to base the choice on breaking of speech patterns. Occasions when the tongue is needed to make a gap, or not, as the case may be. The idea being that an will flow into certain words better than a will. Take “an honourable” and “a honourable”, if you will, clearly the choice of an there flows into honourable much more freely than “a” did, so is a better choice… of course, in that instance, other rules would have given the same decision anyway. Clearly this approach leads to the same problems with dialects as the former.

Based on this I would say that the only people who are actively wrong, are those who prescribe that either is strictly correct. People who suggest that “an historic” is wrong are missing the point entirely, trying to prescribe a grammar and yet at the same time moaning that those people who prescribe the alternative are being stuffy, and yet not really helping because in many dialects “an historic” actually sounds better to the ear. I’m not totally sure which I use in conversation, someone should probably listen to that for me, but saying them both in turn now I would suggest that to my own ear “an historic” actually sounds better, and so in future I will certainly not be bothered if I realise that is what I tend to say.

Now brief comment on my placement of punctuation. Based on some brief research my conclusion is that the general view is that in American English, full stops (periods) and commas should always go inside quotes, in British English (and other punctuation in American) should go inside the quotes if and only if they belong to the quote in question. As this is my natural way of thinking (though not what I was taught at school, I admit) I prefer to take the approach of placing the punctuation inside if it was involved in the original quote, and outside otherwise.

It’s amazing how much life can be affected when one is lacking in sleep. After Saturday night’s 21st birthday BBQ/party being largely missed due to having to rescue a friend who had had an unfortunately collision with a hit and run driver, yesterday I was somewhat out of contact with humanity due to the last week’s constant lack of sleep, which itself is partly down to an unfortunate appearance of a badly trained dog, the reappearance of a player-of-loud-music-at-all-hours, and some other unpleasant complexities.

Such is life.

Keeping an eye glancing every so often at the current state of the Mayoral election campaign one cannot help but notice that a major issue seems to be that of London’s congestion charge. Some candidates are in favour, some wish to remove it. Both arguments are to some extent understandable. I cannot help but wonder, however, why the charge has been applied as it has, and why noone seems to have a clear idea of the purpose of said charge.

Just what is the charge about? We know it’s called the “congestion charge”, but is that really what it is for? If that were the case, why then give discounts to alternative fuel vehicles? Surely then it’s become more of a pollution charge?

I can’t help but feel that a more useful approach would be to look at it purely as a pollution charge. It might, and hopefully would, reduce the number of cars on London’s roads, but more importantly it should reduce the average emissions of cars on the roads. It could be based simply on engine size… say a £30/day fee for any car over 3 litre, £15 for any car over 2litre, £5 for anything over a 1.5, and free for anything smaller. Although that would tend to not take account of the fact that newer engines are less polluting in many cases than older engines. Possible then it could be scaled for vehicle age, although that might become difficult.

On the other hand, with MOT tests nowadays cars have to be checked for their emissions… would it not make sense then for all cars to be tested and have their emissions registered with the national database, such that when the car’s tag is looked up in the system, an emissions value is present that can then be used to bias the charging accordingly. That is to say if someone has a 2 litre engine but actually it’s very efficient, then they get some form of discount… if it runs on LPG then the emissions would be lower and similarly a discount could be applied, these would all have to be calculated based on just how much less polluting the engines are, clearly, and I’m not in a position to work out numbers on that, but I certainly can’t see it being a severe problem.

As for traffic calming generally… firstly I’m sure I heard reports last year from the London Ambulance Service that road humps kill more people than they save, although I could be wrong on that one. Seriously though, most traffic calming measures are a joke. First of all all roads have a natural speed that people gravitate to, wide roads tend to be 40 or so, narrow side streets can be as low as 20, motorways I would judge to be about 80 to 85. I’m not suggesting by this that speed limits should be higher, merely that rather than sticking humps in the road to ruin suspension, increase neck injuries, slow down ambulances and increase pollution methods should be applied to reduce the natural speed limit of the road. What appears to be a good example of this is in the New Malden area where roads have had their pavements flattened and raised flowerbeds used to separate the cars from the pedestrians instead…. slowing speeds may or may not have been the reason for this, but driving around the area it has the feeling of not being a real road, and naturally my driving speed seemed to reduce, which is what is needed. You’ll still get the maniacs driving fast, but the police should be arresting that sort of person directly.

There must be better approaches to those used.