When Two Wrongs Make a Right

I remember learning a term in college: reactionary. It meant somebody who reacts negatively and strongly to any social or political change. I think we can apply that term to language as well. I’m not a reactionary, but I suppose I’m a conservative when it comes to language. I find I have to push myself into accepting a change in the language that I don’t like or don’t want to stay as a permanent fixture. I usually don’t really accept the change; I just swallow hard and say something like, “Well, since so many educated native speakers now say that, it’s become ‘acceptable.’” It sometimes hurts to say that, especially if I’m gnashing my teeth, but I take a deep breath and do so. The thing is, I find myself saying that more and more often, and that tends to disturb me. I suppose I’ll have to get used to it, though; it’s the nature of language to change.

Here’s something that’s becoming “acceptable.” I can’t tell you how vividly I remember finding a big red mark an English teacher of mine had put through the word why in a sentence I’d written in a composition. That why was part of the phrase the reason why. When I questioned my teacher about it, she explained it was redundant. She reminded me that why means the same thing as the reason: He told me the reason he had done that. / He told me why he had done that. “You see?” she said smiling. “If we can substitute the reason with why, it shows you that they mean the very same thing, so using them together is a redundancy ― and it’s silly.” I’ve never forgotten that. My teacher really opened my eyes to the world of redundancies, which I spoke about in a previous piece on this blog. And you can bet the ranch that I’ve never said or written the reason why again.

Well, as the saying goes, “That was then; this is now.” I hear educated people say the reason why every single day, usually many times a day. I still cringe a little whenever I hear it ― a reflex action, you know ― but I’m going to develop a tick if I don’t stop cringing. Almost everybody says the reason why these days, so does that mean I have to say once again, “Well, since so many educated native speakers now say that, it’s become acceptable”? I suppose it does. (Can you hear me sighing?)

Here’s another example. I remember being taught that we should use each other when speaking about only two of something and one another when speaking about three or more. Come to think of it, I was taught the same grammar rule for between and among. Well, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard educated speakers throw that rule to the wind and use one another for just two people and use between for three or more. I just shake my head and wonder. I’ve found that even dictionaries and fairly recent grammar books now accept one another in place of each other. (I’m sighing again.) So can the same laissez-faire attitude towards between and among be far off? Probably not.

And what about less and the least vs. fewer and the fewest? Awhile back I was watching a hit TV show called The Biggest Loser. They had some trivia questions for the television audience, among which (not between which!) was, “Which of the following kinds of pie has the least calories?” Yes! They said “the least calories”! The writer who came up with that question thought it was fine. The graphic designer who mounted it on the screen thought it was fine. The narrator who did the voiceover thought it was fine. I guess the director thought it was fine. Everybody thought it was fine ― except me! At least, that’s the feeling I got. Well, if nobody thinks there’s a problem with it, who am I to decry that use? Do you see why I wonder if I’m just a conservative or a true reactionary? And I don’t want to touch on what I should do in the classroom with my ESOL students. No, no, don’t even go there! I still have nightmares over being forced to deal with explaining why it was okay to say two coffees when the lesson in our antiquated grammar book clearly said coffee was only an uncountable noun. Ugh!

So what’s your take on all of this? Are you an ultraliberal as far as these kinds of language change go? Or perhaps you’re a conservative, or even a reactionary. I’d really like to know if I’m all alone or if I have colleagues I can commiserate with. Tell me what changes you’ve noticed that you find either completely acceptable or you would like to see disappear from common usage. Talk to me!

It's Just Not Enough!

Something there is in human nature that makes us want to be absolutely sure others have understood what we’ve said. Something there is in our nature that makes us want to add unnecessary bits and pieces to our utterances just to make sure enough attention has been drawn to whatever our point is or because we feel an urge to stress our point. It’s a trait that seems to have always been with us and can be traced back even in writing to the ancient Egyptians.

Although most people don’t realize it, the ancient Egyptians actually had an alphabet, but never woke up to the fact that all they needed were the hieroglyphs that represented individual sounds, just as letters do today. One thing they did was add lots of hieroglyphs that worked together with their alphabetical symbols. Here’s a typical example. The Egyptian word for “beautiful” was nefer. They had a symbol for n (water), a symbol for f (a horned viper), and a symbol for r (an open mouth). They even had symbols for the vowels, but rarely used them, much as we see in Hebrew and Arabic today. So if they’d wanted to, the Egyptians could simply have written nefer, but they didn’t. What they did to make sure nobody would get confused was to add one symbol which, by itself, represented the whole word nefer (a heart and windpipe of a animal) and then repeat the f and the r. They didn’t pronounce it nefer-fer, though; they still just pronounced it nefer! They just didn’t feel right about using only the phonetic glyphs. They had to build in a redundancy to feel sure when writing down words.

I get a real kick out of finding all sorts of redundancies in English that basically satisfy the same need that the ancient Egyptians had. Take, for example, that final –s or –es on the 3rd person singular of verbs in the simple present tense. Why on earth do we need that inflected form? We don’t have any endings on the other persons, singular or plural, so why do we persist in keeping that one inflected ending? It’s a mystery to me, especially because it’s totally redundant. As soon as I say he, she, or it, you know who or what the following verb refers to (he like, she need, it go), so that’s why it’s redundant ― and silly.

I’ve got an idea! Can you recognize some typical redundancies you hear all the time? The thing is, most people don’t realize they’re being redundant when they say these things. Even though most writing teachers would consider their inclusion poor writing style, they’re firmly entrenched in how a great many people speak. So look over each of the following sentences, pick out the redundancy or redundancies, and send in your findings:

• “Krueger National Park in South Africa is a very unique wild animal reserve.”
• “The reason why he did it was unclear.”
• “Make sure you remember your PIN number when you go to use the ATM machine.”
• “Students from other countries who want to study at American universities will need to achieve a certain score on the TOEFL test.”
• “Scuba diving in the Bahamas was the most unique experience I’ve ever had.”
• “Let’s have tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.”
• “The police were able to prove that the car had been stolen by its VIN number.”
• “Watch an all new episode of Grey’s Anatomy next Thursday night here on ABC.”
• “The police were able to return most of the stolen clothes back to the store.”

So how did you do? Did you find them all? Please let me know!

Whatever the reasons, it’s apparent that redundancy plays a role in language to satisfy some deep-seated need to make things clearer or to add an extra “oomph” to them. Whether they actually do or not I’ll leave up to you to decide. I’m looking forward to seeing if you find those silly little extras in the sentences I’ve cited. Happy hunting!

May I Have a Word? Part 2

When I first started my blog, I thought it would be fun to delve into some of the challenging offerings of English vocabulary. I shared with you some of the more daunting questions about words and phrases that have caught my attention over the years. As I mentioned in that first piece, "May I Have a Word" (which is included in my first entry, "Welcome to My Blog"), there’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as being ambushed by a question such as “What’s the difference between electric and electrical?” (And please, let’s not add electronic to the mix!)

Well, I’m not finished. I still have lots of words and phrases that make me pause and ponder. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by one of my students why it is that we have two words to distinguish some living animals from their meat, but we don’t do that for all of them. I stared blankly at my student, not quite sure what he was talking about. Recognizing that needy look on my face, the student offered an example: “You know, like cow and beef.” “Oh!” I said. “Now I get it!” So I listed the four most common domestic animals and meats as examples on the board:

• cow → beef
• calf → veal
• sheep → mutton
• pig → pork

That was all well and good, but could I explain the reason for this? It just so happened that I could! I remembered back to when I had taken a course on the history of the English language. The Saxon peasants served the Norman aristocrats in 12th century England, and the vocabulary from the two languages (Anglo-Saxon and Norman French) started to mix at that time. It so happens that when those animals were slaughtered, butchered, and their meat brought into the kitchens, the Saxon workers called them by their Anglo-Saxon names (cow, calf, sheep, and pig), but that when their meat was cooked and brought into the dining room for the Norman aristocrats to munch on, their Norman French names were used (beef, veal, mutton, and pork). That differentiation stuck through all these centuries, and that’s why we still have different words for those animals and their meat.

But then I got ambushed. Another student with a big grin on her face asked me, “Why is chicken the same word for the animal and the meat?” And another student piped up with “What about lamb and goat? Total silence fell over the room as the students awaited my answers. It was the kind of silence that precedes a great explosion or clap of thunder as a storm begins. I don’t particularly like being ambushed in class, but it’s an occupational hazard, I guess. So there I was, left holding the bag ― which, by the way, was an idiomatic expression I taught the students right then and there. It was one of those “teachable moments” I’d learned about in one of those education courses I’d taken so many years before.
Yes, I was left holding the bag. I had no idea how to respond to those questions. All I could do was fess up to my students and tell them I’d try to find the answers. Well, I still haven’t. If you’ve got the answers, please let me know!

Getting back to more of those words and phrases I’ve pondered over from time to time, here are more that I’d like to share with you, some of which come from my own head, and some from the head of authors such as Richard Lederer*. Please think about them. I think you should join me in wondering about these little gems of the language.

• How do you distinguish between to die of something and to die from something?
• Does quicksand really work quickly?
• We ship by truck, but we send cargo by ship, right?
• If the stars are out, they’re visible, but if the lights are out, they’re invisible!
• Why do we recite at a play, but play at a recital?
• If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
• I know what a gate is; that opening in a fence that I can go through. And I know what a door is, too. Well then, why do we call the thing you pass through at the airport when boarding a plane a gate when it’s a door? I’ve never seen a fence there, have you?
• If there are proper nouns, are there also improper nouns?
• Grapefruit. A grape is already a fruit, so why is this called a grapefruit?
• For that matter, if tuna is already a fish, why do lots of people say tuna fish? Does this have any connection by analogy to grapefruit?

Help me out here, folks. If you’ve got any sage responses to my ponderings, please send them in.

*Richard Lederer. Crazy English. Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster, Inc.). 1998

Tense about Tense

Whenever I open an ESOL grammar book and look at the table of contents, I wince a little. I see things like "present continuous tense," "present perfect tense," "past perfect tense," and this terminology makes me tense. Although many people don't realize it, linguistically speaking, there are only two tenses in English, the present and the past. What I'm really talking about are the simple present and the simple past. That's it; two tenses. How can that be? Well, linguists explain that tense is only tense when it's created by just using the basic form of a verb, adding a prefix, infix, or suffix to a verb, or when there is an internal change to a verb. So when I say I work, she works, that shows tense, and when I say she worked, I've added another suffix to the verb, -ed, so that's tense. And, of course, with a verb like speak, if I want the past, I make an internal change and get spoke, which once again shows tense. So English only has two tenses according to linguists, unlike Latin. Now there's a language with oodles of tenses! Ego laboro (I work/am working), laborabam (I was working/used to work), laboravi (worked), laboraveram (had worked), laborabo (will work), laboravero, (will have worked). Latin's got all kinds of suffixes and all kinds of tenses.

So what are all those other forms of a verb in English if they're not tenses? Linguistically, they're called aspects, aspects of the verb. The present progressive is an aspect of the verb, and so is the present perfect and the present perfect progressive, and the past perfect, and the future with be going to or will -- and I could go on. Now, in a practical sense, is there really any benefit to thinking of these as aspects of a verb rather than as tenses? I think so. I think there really is a practical benefit. When I say I feel great or I'm feeling great, I'm not changing the tense (the time) of the verb feel; I'm simply applying a different aspect to that verb. And when I say He finished the job or He's finished the job, I'm once again applying a different aspect to the action of finishing something rather than a different time. I think that matters. I think that might help some students understand why we have forms like the present perfect and the role those forms play in English grammar.

The only other thing that makes me wince when I look at those tables of contents is some of the names I see given to those tenses and aspects. My reaction isn't based on the aesthetics of the names, but on the fact that they can be very misleading and end up confusing our students. I’ve already written a piece about the so-called “simple” present (“A Present for You”), but that’s the first one that comes to mind. Then there are the so-called “present continuous” and the “past continuous.” “Continuous”? What does that mean, continuous? Doesn’t continuous mean the action never ends? Is it like the earth is on a continuous orbit around the sun? If I were a student and saw that name, that's exactly what I might imagine. Kudos to the person who started calling this aspect “the present progressive.” Now that I can understand. It deals with an action that's in progress at that moment. Teachers can get that ― and so can their students. And we’ve got the so-called present “perfect.” What’s so “perfect” about it? Come to think of it, most teachers I know wish the present perfect didn’t exist at all because it’s so tough to teach and get students to internalize. Some perfection that is!

I think it would be nice to go back to using such terms as the “preterit” instead of the simple past, don’t you? It’s a nice, neutral name that carries no opinions about it. Let me judge for myself if it’s “simple” or not. If you’ve got any names for the tenses or aspects that you think would work better than the ones we’ve got now, let’s hear them. Who knows . . . We may just start a small ESOL grammar revolution! So let me hear from you, fellow rebels!

We’re All Entitled

I’ve always found our most common titles in English quite amazing. Have you ever really thought about Mr., Mrs., Miss, and Ms.? (Come to think of it, does anybody use Miss anymore?)

I’ve wondered why we write those odd abbreviations for the first two I listed, but when we say them out loud, something that doesn’t quite seem related pops out of our mouths. Mr. is “Mister,” but what’s a mister? I’m familiar with a garden gadget that keeps plants moist; that’s a mister. But a man? Is a mister a man who mists plants? Naw, that couldn’t be the derivation. And Mrs. is pronounced “missez,” right? Well, what happened to the r? Maybe we’re really supposed to say “mirsez.”

I don’t like feeling ignorant, so I dug into where these titles came from. Mister is a funny pronunciation for master. So that means I’m really Master Firsten. Oh, but wait a minute. I recall that when I was a kid, some adults put the title master in front of a boy’s first name to distinguish a kid from a grown-up. In fact, I do remember grown-ups sometimes calling me "Master Richard." So somehow, master got changed to mister and mister got to be used for grown-up men. At least that seems to be what happened.

Moving right along, it turns out that missez comes from “mistress.” Mistress? Wait a minute! So my mother could have been called "Mistress Firsten"? Or maybe "Mistress Tess." Wow! I think my feisty mother would have liked that. It conjures up all sorts of interesting images!

The thing that rankles is how these nice titles can go from being formal and polite to downright common and even almost vulgar. How, you ask? Use them along with a surname when you address people and you’re nice and polite: “One moment, Mr. Pearson.” “Hold on, Mrs. Longman.” But drop the surnames (maybe because you don’t know these people) and suddenly you’re crude and boorish: “One moment, mister.” “Hold on, missez.” Ah, but you know how to get around that problem, don't you? You’ve got to substitute those two titles with two other titles if you want to stay polite, so you say sir and madam or ma’am: “One moment, sir.” Ooh, that sounds nice, and so polite! “Hold on, madam.” Uh . . . I’m not so sure about this one. Hmm . . . “Hold on, ma’am”? Yes! That sounds better. So what’s wrong with madam? I think we tend to use madam only when we’re annoyed or angry. To me it sounds exaggerated or overly polite, even sarcastic ― well, that is, unless you’re a butler: “Dinner is served, madam.”

But what if you’re addressing more than one man or woman? Then what? “One moment, sirs.” Nope, that won’t cut it ― unless maybe if you’re in the military. “Hold on, ma’ams.” I don’t even think ma’ams is a word! Now what do you do? Of course! You have to use two more different titles if you’re addressing more than one person: “One moment, gentlemen.” “Hold on, ladies.” (Is your head beginning to spin? Mine is!) Yes, ladies sounds nice as a plural title to use when the singular ma’am won’t do. Oh, no! I just thought of something. What about the singular, lady? "Hold on, lady." Oh, my goodness! We're back to crude and boorish ― almost vulgar ― and it can sound angry, too. So that means if you use ladies, it sounds refined, but if you use lady, you get the opposite result. (Are you shaking your head? I’m shaking my head.)

I think we need to recap: Mister comes from “master,” but that doesn’t mean he’s your master, and Master can be used with a boy’s first name if you want to be super-formal, although this title seems to be dying out. Now then, Missez comes from “mistress,” but that doesn’t mean she’s somebody’s mistress; it means she’s married! In addition, if we want to stay polite, we can’t address somebody as mister or missez without a surname, so we switch to sir or ma’am if we’re talking to one man or woman, and we switch again to gentlemen or ladies if we're talking to two or more men or women. And we’ve got to remember that we can use ladies, but we shouldn't use lady unless we're upset and want to sound low-class. Have you got all that? And to think, our students have to deal with this daunting stuff, too!

Oh! And speaking of a married woman or “the missez” as some low-class speakers might say, what about Ms., which we pronounce "miz"? Most people don’t know that it goes back to the 1700s as a sort of slurred way of quickly saying missez. Besides that, it’s always been a common way of pronouncing Mrs. in parts of the American South: “Mornin’, Mizz Davis.” Sheila Michaels, an American involved in the beginnings of the feminist movement, said there should be a title for women that didn’t divulge their marital status, just as the title Mr. doesn’t divulge that about a man. These days Ms. is heard much more often than Miss or Mrs. Does that mean those two titles may be on the way out?

So I was thinking and thinking about these common titles, especially the female ones, and it suddenly dawned on me: When addressing a top politician like a president or prime minister, we say "Mr. President" or "Mr. Prime Minister," but since we’re so au courant nowadays, if Hillary Clinton becomes the first female American president, how will she want to be addressed? "Mrs. President"? "Ms. President"? "Madam President"? Hmm . . . My money’s on "Madam President." It strikes me as a cut above the other two options. What do you think? And have your students mastered the use of Mr., Miss, Mrs., and Ms.? I’d love to hear any war stories you’ve got.

By the way, mistresses and masters . . . er, . . . ladies and gentlemen, please stay tuned, because I’ve got lots more to say about titles, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

Why Do We Say That?

I thought I’d take a slight break from things strictly grammatical this week and talk tongue-in-cheek about a topic that’s always fascinated me, the etymology of words and names. Having been a history buff all my life, especially ancient history, I’ve found it interesting to discover where names come from or how idiomatic expressions got their starts. I mean, haven’t you ever wondered why we say It’s raining cats and dogs? That’s one of the early-on idioms many of us teach our students, but when a student once asked me why English speakers say that, I just gave him a blank stare and then quickly said something devilishly clever like, “Because that’s English.” See how quickly I can think on my feet? Hmm . . .

Well, okay, why do we say It’s raining cats and dogs? Here’s one of the most popular explanations, which may very well be what is commonly referred to these days as an "urban legend." In England during the Middle Ages, most commoners’ houses had thatched roofs. That was the place where animals could keep warm in the colder months, so the pets, like dogs and cats, and other small animals lived on or in those thatched roofs. When it rained, the roofs became slippery, and sometimes the animals slid and fell off the roofs. That may be where we get the idiomatic expression It's raining cats and dogs. Is it true? Well, maybe not, but it's certainly an interesting story!

I remember many years ago wondering about the origin of my own first name. I used to joke that Richard must mean “a rich man,” and that’s what my folks had wished me to become when I grew up. Well, I was wrong. It turns out that the name is made up of two Germanic words, ric and hard, and they mean “brave power.” Other male names ending in (h)ard are also Germanic in origin. Howard means “brave heart” and Leonard means “brave lion.” I think that’s neat!

My students have always been fascinated by the stories I can now tell them surrounding the possible origins of idiomatic expressions, and I get a big kick out of being able to tell them those stories instead of cleverly saying, “Because that’s English.” Those stories open up windows into what life was like hundreds of years ago. They’re like small archaeological dig sites, only made up of words instead of artifacts you can hold in your hand. That story about the origin of It’s raining cats and dogs is a perfect example.

Here’s one more creative explanation that you might find interesting. What’s wonderful about this story is that it explains two idiomatic expressions at the same time: Because land in England was at such a premium even in the Middle Ages, people started running out of places to bury their dead. So they would dig up coffins and reuse the graves ― a practice that's now illegal. Sometimes when reopening coffins, they’d find scratch marks inside. People quickly realized they had been burying some of their loved ones alive. To stop that horror from happening, they tied a string around the dead person's wrist, brought the string through the coffin and up to the surface of the ground, and tied the string to a bell that was mounted on a stand next to the grave. Someone would be given the charming task of sitting next to the grave all night to listen for the bell. If the bell started ringing, he’d run to get help to dig up the “dead person” before he or she really was dead! That’s why on the graveyard shift, they knew someone might be saved by the bell. Interesting, right?

When I tell one of these stories to my students, I feel like a camp counselor gathered with my kids around a roaring campfire. I find these tales, whether true or not, to be a great tool to increase my students' attentiveness, listening comprehension, and retention of the idiomatic expressions under discussion. Anything that works is fine by me!

As a change of pace, I’m going to list a few of my favorite idiomatic expressions. Let’s see if you can tell us how they came to be. Are you ready? Okay, let’s go!

1. That husband of mine! He’s not well educated, but he always manages to bring home the bacon.
2. Mildred always tips extravagantly at restaurants. She acts like she’s a member of the upper crust.
3. Good night. Sleep tight.
4. Here’s a rule of thumb for good cooks: Only add salt and pepper to meat right before cooking it.
5. You want to know what we did last night? We just sat around and chewed the fat.

There you go. Five commonly used idiomatic expressions with really interesting stories behind them. Let’s see if you can become part-time etymologists and tell us why we say what we say. I think you’ll be very surprised by what you may find out, and I can't wait to read your comments on these great idioms!

I Indefinitely Get It

It’s more than likely that at one time or another you’ve heard that old philosophical question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” So now I ask you, which came first, a or an? Here’s about as basic an element of English as you can get, and yet I can’t figure out the answer to that question. I know, I know; people usually teach that the indefinite article is a and that it becomes an if the noun that follows begins with a vowel sound. Well, can’t the reverse be possible? Can’t it be that the indefinite article is an and that it becomes a if the noun that follows begins with a consonant sound? I wonder . . .

I also wonder about the term “the indefinite article.” I don’t think that’s right. I think it should be “the indefinite articles.” I don’t know about you, but I see two articles, an and a. Why do grammarians and teachers keep saying there’s only one indefinite article? I don’t get it.

Well, this has really bothered me from time to time, so now with all this modern technology and the “information highway” that we call the Web, I figured it might be fun to google an and a (I just love this new verb!) and see what I could come up with as far as whether or not there’s one indefinite article or two. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. What did I find? There are grammarians who say there are three indefinite articles! Not one, not two ― but three! (Am I being ambushed again?)

I found lots of hits on Google.com for “English indefinite article” (3,010) and more hits than I had expected for “English indefinite articles” (659), and among the links for the latter, I came across grammarians who consider some as an indefinite article, the plural equivalent of an and a. Now I’ve always considered that to be a determiner, and one link actually says that most people view it that way, but that didn’t stop the author from saying that he still feels some should be categorized as an indefinite article since it represents the plural form of an and a as in I have an onion. / I have some onions. I think using some in this sentence is more natural sounding than simply saying I have onions. Gee, I can see his point about considering some as an indefinite article. Can you?

But I’ve wondered about something else as well: How do we pronounce a? For me there’s only one pronunciation, the schwa sound [Ə], the same sound as the initial vowel in applaud. But then I know there are people who say [e] as in aim. Do they always say [e], or do they waffle between [Ə] and [e]? There may be times when some people say [e] with a noun just to emphasize it for one reason or another, but I’m not one of them ― at least I don’t think I am. Are you? So how do we teach the pronunciation of a to our students? Thank goodness we don’t have this conundrum with an or some ― if you go along with considering some an indefinite article rather than a determiner.

And did you know that because native speakers got mixed up between a and an at some point in the history of English that they actually changed at least a couple of nouns accidentally? Here’s how those words would be today if that confusion hadn’t screwed them up:

A: Hey, Milt, are we on for the softball game this coming Saturday?
B: Well, I hope so, but we have to find somebody to be a numpire. Gus has the flu.

A: Chloe, you’re going to the supermarket later today, right?
B: Yes, that’s right. Do you need something?
A: Can you go to the housewares aisle and pick me up a napron?
B: Sure thing, Phyllis.

Yep, believe it or not, the original words were numpire and napron, not umpire and apron! Somewhere along the line, people attached the [n] to the wrong word through a phenomenon called juncture loss. How weird is that!

So what have I come away with after wondering about an and a and the chicken-vs.-egg question? I’ve come away with realizing more than ever how complex even the so-called simplest elements of a language can be. I’ve also come away with a greater appreciation for how interesting it is to delve into an item of the English language that I would otherwise have considered pretty banal. Banal? Not by a long shot! I don’t say that I accept the idea that we have three indefinite articles in English even though I can see that point of view. I may not completely be a traditionalist, but I do hold on to some traditions I find hard to break, like only thinking of an and a as the indefinite articles in English. And yes, I do feel we have two indefinite articles ― even though I’m not quite sure how to teach the pronunciation of one of them. What’s your take on all of this?