An Honor to Be of Assistance

Apparently when the first letter "H" in a word is mute you use the article "an" before it. I guess it's about the sound of the word rather than the actual spelling.

So says this.

Presumably this rule applies to the phrase "An Hundred" as a holdover from back in the day when everyone in the world spoke with a cockney accent.

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Spoonful of Nutella

Contrastive reduplication

The phrase may not sound familiar from your English classes, but you'd know it when you heard it. Apparently it's now a categorized thing that someone wrote a paper on:

This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in It''s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad, or Do you LIKE-HIM-like him?

Via Boing Boing, via Mark Rabnett's Posterous.

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