Haitch is for horrified: How my column launched a H-bomb

Letters go missing. Have you noticed? Others give up spots to new letters or change their sound. Just as some letters hop into bed with new friends, nestling in words they have no place in being.

Frisky business. Like a dear friend whose antics are causing concern, English is spoiling for an intervention, a sober heart-to-heart – or so the recent influx of emails told me. Last month, over 100 comments hit the screens, mainly due to H.

The haitch vs aitch debate is far from settled.Credit: iStock

That’s aitch or haitch – take your pick, as nobody swings both ways. Robert Drewe sparked the piece, watching ABC TV’s Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee and noting the haitch bias among contestants. As soon as I shared the news, the flame wars erupted. Sticklers and crusaders, all of you, saying why aitch is proper or haitch is logical.

“Logical?!” seethed one poster online. “If you’re going to pronounce haitch, then why not mem, nen, sess or feff?” Or wuh, for double-u. As pushback, one haitcher argued the aspirated version is more efficient since aitch asks you “to twist your mouth into an unnatural position, while haitch just flows”. Simple ergonomics.

Many of you blamed Irish nuns and brothers for the heresy, presuming aitch sits on God’s right side. Historically, that holds some water. Back in 2016, the ABC’s language expert Tiger Webb explored the divisive letter, airing the idea that Irish Catholic educators, brought to Australia in the mid-1800s, held haitch in the highest honour.

By extension, many students of that system tended to be proletarian and obviously Catholic. Hence, H’s utterance became a classist shibboleth, the Pepsi test of religion and breeding. Or so ran the theory, a notion echoed in haitch’s common disapproval as being “improper”, a judgier alternative to “wrong”.

Yet the theory is wobbly. Comedians of multiple cultures on Spelling Bee defy the narrative, where Drewe noted a haitch leaning. Meanwhile, Frederick Ludowyk, working for the Australian National Dictionary in 1998, spent weeks watching Wheel of Fortune players, registering the number of haitchers versus aitchers. The tally was 60 per cent in the haitch camp, the Irish-Catholic baggage going astray. Indeed, if the education theory once held water, it’s now a colander.

James Valentine, not just ABC Sydney’s arvo host but an elocutionist’s son, shared a 2016 episode of his Headroom podcast, Aitchers Gonna Hate. “There’s a disputed pronunciation – it’s no more than a breath of air, an exhalation, a puff through the larynx at the beginning of a noun, but it’s a puff they don’t do.”

Talkback callers affirmed Valentine’s claim that aitchers are adamant in their sense of right or propriety, while their counterparts don’t give a fig. Or quoting one response among last month’s posts: “I hated being corrected as a kid for saying haitch instead of aitch. My natural inclination was to always say haitch, and it really peeved me every time some over-pedantic snob would interrupt me to say, ‘No, it’s aitch’. So saying haitch is my little rebellion…”

A small rebellion that’s been raging for over a century, as Tiger Webb’s story proved. Take Cecil Poole, writing for the Dubbo and Macquarie Advocate in 1910, who deems haitch as slummocky, being Edwardian for lazy. Or Gordon Brown, the Senate president of 1944, decrying “various members of parliament pronounce H as ‘haitch’, whereas its proper pronunciation is ‘aitch’.”

There’s that word again – proper. Beseech all you like; propriety is a wish, not a law, a rectitude our wanton tongue will never lick.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.

For subscribers: Get tips, tricks and word games from our crosswords guru, plus links to our online puzzles and quizzes, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Sign up for our Puzzled with David Astle newsletter.