“It can be cast in an heroic way.”

Adjectives, Hypercorrection

I heard this yesterday on NPR.

Problem:
The indefinite article is incorrect.

Explanation:
I was listening yesterday to an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about Barack Obama’s pending presidential inauguration when I heard, “It can be cast in an heroic way.”

The problem with this sentence is that the “h” in the adjective “heroic” is never silent.

So just as one should not say or write “an helpful man”, one should not say or write “an heroic way”.

I believe that the tendency among some speakers of American English to use the indefinite article “an” in front of the adjective “heroic” is a form of hypercorrection — as if to say, “If ‘a’ is correct, then ‘an’ must be more correct.”

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • ” a heroic” — 1,330,000 matches
  • ” an heroic” — 184,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct ” a heroic” versus the incorrect ” an heroic” by a ratio of 22.6-to-1, which is good but not great.

Solution:
“It can be cast in a heroic way.”