English Language Fun

Some nights, I am kept awake with worry.  Other nights, I am too stressed to sleep.  Sometimes, I'm too hot; other times, too cold.  It can be too noisy or too quiet.  Other nights, I can have too many pillows or not enough.  Too much duvet, not enough duvet.

All fairly reasonable excuses to have sleep evade me.

However, there are some nights when things of a completely random nature keep me open.  Blue Fairy, the Speed of Dark, Why is X called X...  You know, earth-shattering questions that may well undo the fabric of time itself.

Hey, you never know.

Last night, however, a new one cropped into my mind.  Now, I am ready for someone to point out an answer that I could well have found through a Google search of my own, but none the less, I was thinking on the English Language.  I'm told it is an absolute bastard to learn, and I can well believe it.  They're There Their, Lead and Lead, the apostrophe and other fun punctuation marks...

This time though, I was dwelling on "a" and "an"  In school, I learned that it's "a" if the word starts with a consonant.  A ball.  A dog.  A man-eating dinosaur.  If it started with a vowel, then it was "an"  An apple.  An egg.  An orange.

But then my brain pointed out: A one hundred pound weight.  A female sheep is a Ewe. I'm having an X-Ray.  I'll be an hour.  It's an honour.

So then I went through the alphabet, and figured that even saying each letter is different with either "A" or "An"

An A.  A B.  A C.  A D. An E. An F.  A G.  An H.  An I.  A J.  A K.  An L.  An M.
An N.  An O. A P.  A Q.  An R. An S.  A T.  A U.  A V.  A W.  An X.  A Y.  A Z.

Now, surely the vowels should be An-Vowel, and the consonants should be A-Consonant.

Hours...  Hours and hours I was laying thinking about this.  I think I need medical help!  I'm sure someone is going to tell me the how-to's and why-for's, but still...