Why I really ’ate ‘Haitch’ – but not for the reason Amol Rajan thinks…

Your starter for 10: what is the correct way to pronounce the letter H? Your answer may reveal more about you than you might think, writes Jonathan Margolis

Amol Rajan says that one of the things he has learnt while presenting ‘University Challenge’ is the correct way to say ‘H’ (PA Media)

So, what is the correct way to refer to the eighth letter of the alphabet? Aitch? Or haitch?

This key controversy of the age has been raised this week by Amol Rajan, the personable south Londoner who hosts Radio 4’s Today programme, BBC TV’s University Challenge and former editor of The Independent.

Rajan wrote, having ended his first year of quizzing Britain’s cleverest students, that one of the things he has learned is the “correct” way to say “H”.

“All my life I’ve pronounced it ‘Haitch’,” he wrote, “dimly aware that I was getting it ‘wrong’. Everyone I grew up with says ‘Haitch’. My mates say ‘Haitch’. But, dear reader, I’m here to tell you: it’s ‘Aitch.’”

His bafflement is justified. The strange case of aitch/haitch is one of the oddest in the English language. For generations, it has been considered lazy and uncouth to fail to aspirate the eighth letter when it starts a word.

So, if you’re meeting the King, or your kids’ headteacher, or the vicar, or the person interviewing you for a job, British tradition (but, significantly, not Irish), dictates that you don’t talk about going on ’oliday or some experience you’ve had being ’orrible.

With the exception of this one rogue usage, in which the broadly posh and/or educated pronounce the “lazy” way as “aitch”, while the broadly not posh (or Irish or “not so educated”) say what you might imagine to be the posh way, “haitch”.

I have to confess, I really ’ate haitch. As a not posh but upwardly mobile Essex person brought up when saying haitch was either a faux pas, or a comedic way of sounding like a lower-class Dickens character, haitch grates as finger-down-the-chalkboard scrapingly as “toilet” or “lounge”.

In recent months, I’ve heard a Channel 4 continuity announcer talking about an upcoming programme on the “N haitch S” – which is bizarre since it’s harder to say than N aitch S.

I’ve heard Richard Walker, OBE, Durham University graduate, qualified chartered surveyor and managing director of his family’s supermarket chain Iceland, haitch-ing away on Radio 4.

And among haitch-ers I’ve heard in action have been young professionals and several TV presenters, especially on programmes aimed at children and teenagers.

Haitch-ing is not, so far as I can tell, a case of wanting to sound like the common people – arch example being Tony Blair in his pomp taking care to drop his aitches.

Far worse, haitch is, in my submission, a misaimed, try-hard attempt to sound posh. I have an awful feeling that when I carefully say “aitch”, younger people think it’s me that’s ignorant.

Yet making judgements about people for the way they pronounce words, or the word they use for a specific thing – be that a loo or a sitting room – is dangerous territory.

I remember being distinctly put out when I first came to work in London journalism – on a society gossip column no less – that my mannerly habit of saying “pardon” when I hadn’t quite heard something was, in fact, ill-bred, and that really smart people said “what?” As in aitch/haitch, the rougher-sounding version was, perversely, the more educated.

Rajan researched the haitch issue, he says, and discovered that while haitch is standard in Ireland, it is also considered “a possible British variant”, which, as he has accepted – he has declared himself an aitch-er from now on – is some way short of a full endorsement.

However, the frustration for us – the thin, gammon line of aitch traditionalists – is that a tipping point of sorts seems close. Although 90 per cent of readers in a live poll yesterday in The Times voted for aitch over haitch as the correct version, haitch is gaining ground. A quarter of people under 30 are said today to aspirate H. If they teach their children that it’s haitch that’s correct, then it kind of will be.

And the time is approaching when aitchers will feel like pedantic old toffs because the haitch/aitch standoff just sounds like another of those hidden linguistic tank traps laid by older people to lord it over the young.

I remember being humiliated by teachers in the sixties for saying “OK” and for incorrect use (as in my previous sentence) of the word “just”.

They said using “just” to mean “merely” was a slangy Americanism, but I wasn’t really interested or inclined to stop using it in this way because I regarded such pedants as simply (or just) out of touch.

Which, I imagine, is how haitchers now regard aitchers.