Mind Your "A's" and "An's"

The better part of my college days were spent studying the English Language and from those rigorous studies I walk away a changed man. No longer do I have a passive disinterest in our written and spoken tongue, now I am a man who absolutely loathes the damn thing.

Let's be fair, no matter how much you try to justify English it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You can trace the etymology or dissect the meanings of individual Latin roots that are thrown about from one word to another like a ragged pig skin, but the one thing you won't find in your efforts are concrete rules. By the very nature of English there are always exceptions to every rule and there is no definitive argument that one can make to justify why the word "clip" means to both fasten and detach. Still, vitriol aside, the source of all this complication has a lot to do with the amalgam factor. English is nothing more than a collection of different words and sounds that have been disassembled and reconstructed back into some freakish "Reanimator" monstrosity. What we are left with is a stew that has been boiling on the stove for too long, we added too many ingredients and lost track of time, allowing it to congeal into a uniform brown mess.

What's worse is periodically the mice that run the wheels in our heads turn on the power and we get a great idea, something down right genius. The English language presents us with something that eases our pains and demonstrates to us that the universe is not all chaos and that tiny motes of brilliance can be harnessed for good. Then we have to go ahead and screw that up too.

Take the words "A" and "An"; we all know how to use them and their purpose is one of convenience. "A" is put in place before a word that begins with a consonant because it lets the pairing roll together like a gentle stream, it distracts from any sort of odd maneuvering of the tongue and keeps the pace of the sentence in tact. "An" on the other hand is used in place of "A" when the word that follows begins with a vowel. Again, this is mostly done to help us sound things out, if you try to use "A" in place of "An" in these circumstances the speaker usually has to take a slight pause between words while their mouth hangs agape like some slack jawed hill-billy. How glorious it would be if the application of these words were so simple; but we can't have that now can we?

The real issue at hand is that these words are not entirely interchangeable and are designed to fulfill a very specific duty with phonetics. However, it seems as though the real functionality has something to do with the very vowels and consonants themselves. Let's take a look at Acronyms and how they completely fubar this whole design principle.

Believe it or not but the sentence, "I ate a MRE" is appropriate. Not only is it appropriate but its generally considered the only acceptable usage even according to Strunk and White. Sure, it looks well and good on paper but what happens when you sound it out? While the letter M is indeed a consonant, when you pronounce the letter itself it actually begins with a soft vowel sound. If one were to spell the pronunciation of the letter M it might look like "em", or "ehm" for those of us that work at Webster.

This to me is a serious problem because the difference between "A" and "An" is one that entirely has to do with the spoken language, NOT the written one. Why do we have to be so slavish to this rule when it is clearly meant as a means of making dialogue and conversation flow more naturally?

English language I am quite angry with you and I expect a written apology sometime tomorrow morning. Please also provide a decent argument as to why we need the word "flammable" when we had "inflammable" all along.