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What about the practice of dropping certain articles? I've always wondered about this:

UK: "He's in hospital" US: "He's in the hospital"

Isn't the latter actually correct English, even in England? When would you use one and not the other?

The first is used instead of the US "he's been hospitalized", where it's unknown (or irrelevant) exactly which hospital he's been taken to. The second would only be used when a particular hospital has already been discussed. There are plenty of similar constructs: "on holiday" rather than "on a vacation", "in bed" rather than "in their bed", and so on.

Another shibboleth to do with missing words is missing prepositions in US English: I've mainly seen this in cnn.com headlines, but people do it in speech too: "Let's do this Tuesday" rather than "Let's do this on Tuesday". And in US English, "protest" is a transitive verb with no preposition, and you can "protest" gay marriages, whereas in the UK it's intransitive and always takes a preposition: you'd have to "protest against" gay marriages. Mind you, elsewhere there's extra prepositions: in the US you "meet with" someone, whereas in the UK you just "meet" them.

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Speaking of words that start with H... What about the practice of treating H as if it were silent at the start of a word? Even extending to the choice of using "a" or "an" when placing the article before the word:

UK: "The dolphin will jump through an 'oop" US: "The dolphin will jump through a hoop"

"Hoop" has the H sounded in Received Pronunciation UK English, and no-one would say "an hoop" if they sounded the H. However, in the past the H was never sounded, and there are still some words where it isn't, such as "hour". And of course there are words where the H is sounded in some English accents but not others: a Yorkshireman would say "an 'oop". Some style guides for written UK English, including the BBC's, abhor this ambiguity and require "an" for all H words.

Peter