I watched the election coverage in our "Super Spectacular 2008 Election Coverage Obamanation McCainification Center MegaScreen Ultra-Def Extratacular 2008 Election Coverage Headquarters" that we put together in our living room. I kept noticing that the speakers and reporters kept saying it was "an historic night."

This picture has nothing to do with anything.

This sounded odd to me, and I thought that there was perhaps a secret rule of the English language at work that I was not aware of. To the best of my knowledge, "an" goes before any word that starts with a vowel sound and "a" goes before any word with a consonant sound. Since "historic" starts with a consonant sound, it seems correct that it would be proceeded by an "a."

Some words that start with the letter H do so silently, and have a vowel sound first. It makes sense that these words should be proceeded by "an" as in "an heir." But "historic doesn't fall into this category.

I did some googling.

The first site I came to claims that "an" is appropriately used because some speakers prefer to use "an" before any word starting with an H that is three or more syllables. This seems like a pretty obscure rule. While "I have an hypothesis" sounds just a little bit weird "I had an hysterectomy" sound really stupid.

Another site I came to brought out the big guns with references from real printed books. Shamelessly, I will republish the relevant part here.

For choosing a or an, spelling doesn't matter; pronunciation does. A is for consonant sounds; an is for vowel sounds. The ever-popular an historic is incorrect, at least for American speakers, because historic does not begin with a vowel sound. Even those Americans who say "an istoric" will admit that they say "historic," with the consonant h, when the word stands alone. I don't care whether "an istoric" rolls off your tongue more easily than "a historic"; you don't go altering your pronunciation of a word in order to change the article you use before it. Your comfort is none of the language's concern.

Most of the times I've heard "an historic," however, it has been from blustery types who heartily pronounce the h. Think Howard Cosell.

So maybe people who use "an historic" simply don't know how to pronounce the word "historic." That doesn't seem right though, I'm pretty sure Obama didn't say it was "an istoric" night like some kind of 19th century street rat.

Okay, here's a quiz. Put the appropriate article in front of the following words:

• hotel
• historic
• heroic

According to the stylebook for the London Times, each of those words should be proceeded by an "an." Like "I'm going to go stay at an hotel." But fortunately this is British english and their language is even more screwed up than ours (like when referring to a singular noun that denotes a group they use "were" instead of "was"). There is no such rule in American English.

So the sources seem unsure - some saying "an historic" is technically incorrect but okay to use, and some saying it is correct because of some obscure rule. I would tend to agree with this writer and their list of authorities on the subject and will use "a" before historic.