‘Eaven knows if it’s an aitch or a haitch!
Amol Rajan, the host of University Challenge, has announced that, from now on, he will no longer pronounce the letter ‘h’ as ‘haitch’. Instead, he will say ‘aitch’.
He has been bullied into this by a handful of pernickety viewers who have bridled at what they regard as a mispronunciation.
‘Someone at the BBC please tell amol Rajan [below] there is no “haitch” in “aitch” ’ thundered an Edwina Smart from Eastleigh — or should that be Hedwina Smart from Heastleigh?
If I were in Rajan’s shoes, I would immediately start introducing the show as Huniversity Challenge. But Rajan is clearly less combative, and has bowed to the demands of the agitators, or hagitators.
‘all my life I’ve pronounced it “haitch”, dimly aware that I was getting it “wrong”,’ he wrote in a recent blog. ‘ Everyone I grew up with says “haitch”. my mates say “haitch”. But, dear reader, I’m here to tell you: it’s “aitch”. This matters a lot to a lot of people, which is fair enough.’
H has long been the most troublesome letter in the alphabet. It’s the most ghostly of letters: it is completely silent in words such as ‘rhapsody’ or ‘when’ or, indeed, ‘ghostly’. and even when it makes itself heard — in ‘hat’ or ‘hill’ or ‘horrid’— it’s the only letter that bypasses the vocal cords, the throat, the tongue, the teeth and the lips. It’s nothing more than an exhalation of breath.
like an uninvited guest, it is generally present for no reason, taking up space but making no contribution. none of us pronounce the ‘h’ in honour, or hour, or honest, or heir. In america, they drop the ‘h’ in ‘herb’. Small wonder, then, that it has always been regarded as something of a hanger-on in most languages.
In Spanish and French, it is never pronounced; in Italian spelling it is omitted entirely. as long ago as 1712, the grammarian michael maittaire boldly decreed that ‘H is not properly a letter’.
Within the British class system, ‘h’ has long been employed as a booby-trap, planted by the upper classes in order to embarrass the underdogs. Etiquette experts have long sniffed at those who neglect to sound the ‘h’ in words like ‘house’ or ‘habit’. In 1894, a correspondent to The Times newspaper complained at the kind of fashionable wife who ‘ brings “h-less” Socialists as guests to her husband’s house.’
In the film version of Pygmalion, one of the first exercises the grand Professor Higgins gives to the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle is to repeat the sentence, ‘In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.’ Yet, as poor old amol Rajan has just discovered, this rule cannot be relied upon. often, you’re meant to pronounce the ‘h’ in a word, but, just as often, you’re not. Snootiness about mispronouncing ‘h’s gathered force in the 19th century. In David Copperfield, published in 1849, Uriah Heep drops his ‘h’s in order to show how very ‘umble’ he is. a best- selling manual called Enquire Within Upon Everything, first published in 1856, contained 256 ‘rules and hints for correct speaking’. Its author severely upbraided those possessed by what he described as the ‘ most unpleasant habit of misusing the letter H’.
YET, rules about correct speech come and go. The author of Enquire Within Upon Everything also decreed you should never say: ‘If I am not mistaken.’ He claimed the correct expression was: ‘If I mistake not.’ Similarly, he claimed that to say: ‘It is raining very hard,’ was as common as muck: instead, he advised: ‘It is raining very fast.’
a year earlier, in 1855, a manual with the long-winded title, never Too late To learn: mistakes of Daily occurence In Speaking, Writing and Pronunciation Corrected, was equally insistent on the rights and wrongs of everyday speech. Sadly, many of its strictures — for instance, pronouncing ‘rise’ to rhyme with ‘price’ — have failed to last.
To haitch or to aitch? There is no right or wrong.
Should amol Rajan have held out for his haitches? or, to put it another way, should ’e ’ave ’eld out for ’ is haitches? ’Eaven knows. To my mind, you can pronounce them any hold ’ow.