My Onguard lock, that has served me well for over a decade (I have 2 of these, the other one has been in use for almost 15 years), had some of the pins stuck, preventing the key from going inside all the way. Oil didn’t help so I disassembled the lock, cleaned the parts and found two pins that had some slight wear/sharp bits from use that lodged them in place. I filed the sharp edges off from the pins, reassembled the lock and now it seems to work ok. While at it I learned how to serialize these locks and read the serial number of the lock from the key.
The whole affair took about 2 hours because I missed one of the worn pins and repeated the procedure several times before finding the last culprit. It’s a miracle none of the almost invisible springs got lost!
Sorry, I’m just hung up on whether or not U lock should get a or an.
I know it’s a vowel, but it doesn’t sound right with “an” since the “you” sound phonetically starts with a Y.
Not criticizing the post or anything, just a weird thing I noticed.
You nearly did a U-turn on the topic 😉
I came to the thread to post about this. lol. The other replies haven’t explain:
If you say “oo-lock”, that gets “an”. If you say “yew-lock”, that gets “a”.
(It should be the latter. Vowels are a hint with ‘an’, but that’s not the rule - it’s about pronunciation, not spelling)
What about words like “historian”? An Historian and a Historian both “work”; my rule of thumb as a native speaker would be “does it feel odd to say” for this.
If you say it like 'istorian, then “an” would be necessary. Othewise, you need “a”. :)
A Universes, AN Umbrella, A USB stick, AN Umbilical cord.
The “sometimes y” at work!
Definitely ‘a’, not ‘an’.