This Week's Inquirer: Chestnut Hill is fighting over ‘a’ vs ‘an.’ Which goes before SCH?

Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, you’ve stirred up a serious grammatical cauldron.

Chestnut Hill is ready to fight.

Dotting the landscape of one of Philadelphia’s toniest zip codes, signs proclaiming scholastic allegiances have cleaved house against house, family against family, blood against blood.

Those signs’ controversial proclamation?

“An SCH Home.”

Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, you’ve stirred up a serious cauldron.

Some are up in arms about the tiny article An that appears on the signs overtop the school’s coat of arms. One local resident, insisting the signs should read “A SCH Home,” sent me a photo of the offending article, along with a note of exasperation at “an educational institution promoting itself without proper grammar.”

On the one hand, this feels like a distinctly first-world controversy — the kind of kerfuffle that could only arise at a private institution whose high school tuition tops $46,000 a year. (For comparison’s sake, Philadelphia’s median household income is $52,649.)

On the other hand, no one knows how to use articles with acronyms or initialisms, so let’s dive in.

Read the full column at Inquirer.com.