Looks like a case of shifting or wobbly priming to me, as Michael Hoey
has pointed out education has a key role in priming and the problem
might be caused by doubt in a situation when fears about correctness are
uppermost because shifting identities are at work. The questioner is
really asking someone who is perceived to be a native speaker of a
variety (academic/correct) in which he felt he was not a native, what
would be the acceptable version.
Also look how many hits you get for 'nucular', and then look again at
the co-texts and contexts. Quantitative needs to be tempered with
qualitative research.
Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
>An amazing experience I had a few years ago was being asked in all
>seriousness by one of my part-time researchers whether "a bad egg" or
>"an bad egg" was correct. With another part of his time he worked for a
>company alongside another man who had to do some documentation and
>insisted that the correct form was "an bad egg". So far as I could make
>out, this other man (who, like my researcher, was as I understood it a
>native speaker) thought he had learned a rule that "a" v. "an" depends
>on whether the following noun begins with a vowel, and this explicit
>rule overrode in his mind what must surely have been a large weight of
>experience implying that it is not the following noun, but the
>immediately-following word, that matters. The third party was quite
>sure that only "an bad egg" would do in writing; my researcher was
>dubious, but felt he needed my professorial authority to contradict his
>colleague. This seemed to me very striking counter-evidence against the
>idea that native speakers "know" the rules of their language.
>Comparable misunderstandings of the a/an rule might perhaps explain
>sporadic cases of "an w..." written by people who would surely _say_ "a
>w..." when they were speaking spontaneously, without thinking about
>language issues.
>
>Geoffrey Sampson
>
>
>............................................................
> Prof. Geoffrey Sampson MA PhD MBCS CITP ILTM
>
> author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"
>
> Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
> Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England
>
> www.grsampson.net +44 1273 678525
>............................................................
>
>
>
>
>
>
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