Joe, it's the United States standard phone number you dial to reach Information. 411 = Information. Get it?

Try this thread: http://www.painintheenglish.com/post.asp?id=120

Right the first time. It means "the average person."

You may see it as Joe Public, John Q. Public, John Doe, "the average Joe," Joe Six-Pack (in which case it means the average working-class person), or derivations thereof.

The sentiment President Bush expressed is very often heard as "Will it play in Peoria?" Agricultural and industrial Peoria, Illinois, is the stereotypical last bastion of rural conservatism and resistance to innovation. If something can be accepted there, thinks the advertising industry, it should be acceptable anywhere.

Interesting: In legal writing, "John Doe" (or "Jane Doe" if the individual is understood to be female) is the preferred form when a legal document refers to an unknown person. (This usage goes back at least two, maybe three hundred years, or even longer!) When a second unknown person is being spoken of, they're called "Richard Roe" or "Mary Roe."

It's American slang, but I think it started with the generation younger than mine. Will do on the e-mail.

Just by contrast, some cases in which you MIGHT hear "four eleven:"

- Apartment #411
- April 11 (4/11)
- Code 411 (spoken by a police officer, perhaps)
- 411 as a sequential number (i.e. check number 411)
- 411th St. (if there is such a thing) might be pronounced locally as "Four Eleventh Street" by analogy with "Eleventh Street"

The proper way to pronounce the counting number 411 is "four hundred eleven," of course, rather than "four hundred AND eleven."

Since it's a telephone number, you say it by "spelling out" the digits. If I was telling you my area code (Houston, TX, 713), I'd say "seven one three." 411 would be pronounced (and is pronounced) "four one one."

Goossun, that's fairly common.

Hungarian does it so often it's a well-known rule; there are no occurrences of two consonants together at the beginning of a word in the language, so that when they borrow a word, for instance "schola" (school), a vowel sound is added and the word beomes, in this case, "iskola." Since doing so has the effect of putting the two consonants in separate syllables, it may be the case that Hungarian dislikes two consonants together in the same syllable, but I'm not sure if this generalized form of the rule applies.

I've always thought it was curious that Spanish has that E before so many S words (though I love the sound of it). I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with a standard change that happens to a word borrowed from Latin. A Spanish-speaking design drafter where I work thinks I'm on to something here.

Ah--I'm right! Here's a fascinating site (unfortunately it's available only as a Google cache): http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:roeoCmmPiukJ:www.orbilat.com/Modern_Romance/Ibero-Romance/Spanish/Spanish.html+Spanish+E+before+S+prothetic&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

The pertinent mention on that page is this:
"The words beginning with s- followed by a consonant (s impure) receive a prothetic e-, cf.:
CL stare to stand -> Sp. estar"

Unfortunately I don't know a bit about Farsi!

I think the word "single" is most frequently used in scholarly writing.

Also interesting: We always say "a U-turn." U is a vowel, but the pronunciation of its name begins with consonantal Y, as in the word "you."

Kiseun, that's too simplistic...

Here at work we have a type of oil well component, for example. Each component can be assigned a model designation beginning with C, so we call them "C-types." If I was referring to one, I'd call it "a C-type." C is pronounced "see," which of course begins with a consonant, so it takes the article "a."

To contrast: Today I filed my taxes; although I had some difficulty with the forms, I called "an IRS agent" to get help.

This reminds me of the posts about en and em dashes. We say "an em dash" because the "em" begins with a vowel sound.

The same rule applies to S and X, respectively "ess" and "eks." It's "an SMS" and "an X-ray" (preferably with the hyphen, incidentally).

Do not confuse this with acronyms spoken as words. We still say "a NASA scientist" (NASA is always pronounced as "nassa," here in Houston and elsewhere) and "a SETI investigation" (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program, pronounced as "setty").