I've spent some time thinking about this before, and it provides a clue about the writers accent. For example:

"An 'H'", and "a 'H'" are both equally valid following this rule (by my interpretation), depending on how you pronounce the letter 'H'.

A/an herb, for example.

Most English accents don't drop the "h" in herb, although American influence will change that.

But you can hear "an" used in phrases like "an hotel" or "an historic building", where the "h" is usually pronounced.

Most Americans don't pronounce the "h" in "herb" or "herbal" afaict. We do usually pronounce it in people's names though, like "Herb".

/heitsh/ vs /eitsh/. I think it's mostly Irish with the former.

"I think it's mostly Irish with the former."

Actually, it's a shibboleth. It used to be said in Ireland that Roman Catholic called it "haitch" and Protestants called it "aitch". "Haitch" is to be found furth of Ireland though.

And Australian, I believe.

I'm Australian, and I say 'A Hotel', and 'A Herb'. Until very recently, I'd never heard anyone ever say it differently.

GP is talking about the name of the letter H like when you're saying the ABCs. How do you pronounce it?

Pardon me. I actually pronounce it heitsh, but I don't think there's a concensus among Australians about that.

Maybe this could be used to track how some spoken language changes over time in a region or across regions.

This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.

Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?

Sibling comment got the definition, but “TFA” comes from “RTFA”: “read the fucking article”, in response to “yeah, but what about ($THING that was discussed at length in the first paragraph)?”

Origins: “RTFM”. “What’s the switch for ls that prints time stamps?”

“Read the fucking manual.”

The fucking article. Or you could imagine a more polite alternative.

The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed.

The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.

To add to this, because I think it is important context for Americans who may not be aware, football is seen very officially by many European nations and national governments as a cultural counterpart to many international treaties within Europe that were born out of the desire to bring our respective cultures closer together after the second world war.

It is so important, that many countries make it illegal to hide international football matches behind paywalls, specifically.

It is so important, that there are articles written about its importance on EU institutes websites. For example, this one reflects on Footballs importance in relation to the First, Second and Cold wars. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/alerts/european-footb...

To see Trump so flagrantly manipulate it sends a cultural signal that is hard for those outside of Europe to see, and that by some can be seen as the cultural equivalent of the political threats Trump has made against NATO.

At this point, your average European Trump supporter/right wing populist needs only reminding of Trumps interference to get a complete positional change - that's how bad it is.

> It is so important, that many countries make it illegal to hide international football matches behind paywalls, specifically.

Sports is peak diversion from real issues, Whether Europe, US or India and so on. The countries can go to hell, people can drown in endless real problems. But if people can be smothered with sport entertainment so they ignore real things whats better than that.

In India whole country can become absolute crap. Worst on any social, economic indicator but as long free cricket broadcast is on TV and mobile, life is good.

You know this is just making fun of the poor working class? It's offensive.

Don't forget another stuck in the past minimal semantic css based web framework that's almost unusable on anything more complex than its own demo. Complaints about react too, because its new (its 13 years old).

I feel like this is a pretty important thing for the technically minded to get their heads around.

Doesn't the fact that you can't imagine a single reason why youd want multiple fonts on a spreadsheet alarm you?

Excel is for spreadsheets, 9+ fonts is not really a common use case for a spreadsheet. It sounds like OP is trying to do graphic design in Excel, but we'll probably never find out.