By David Astle
Cha-cha felt like the last straw for Robert Drewe. Just hearing “haitch” – that aspirated consonant – was hard enough for the novelist, but to hear a TV contestant use both versions within one Latin dance was excruciating.
According to Robert in his recent email, “While the erudite host, New Zealander Guy Montgomery [of Guy Mont-Spelling Bee on ABC TV], says aitch, about 70 per cent of the contestants favour haitch. In fact, one contestant, asked to spell cha-cha, had a quid each way, spelling ‘Cee-aitch-ay-see-haitch-ay.’”
Pick your side – haitch or aitch?Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
As a card-carrying aitcher, married to a trenchant haitcher, I still find the latter grating. The consonant I should clarify, not my wife. Like Drewe, I inwardly wince. Or deem the speller as a probable Catholic, though such binary thinking is flimsy.
Fittingly, Jonathan Swift springs to mind, the one-time Catholic dean who divided Lilliput into Big-Endians and Little-Endians. The first believed that hard-boiled eggs should be broken on the big end, while I’m sure you can guess the rest. Neither is wrong. The egg still breaks, the yolk remains delicious, and cha-cha still gets spelt.
Not that Drewe is drawing daggers over the issue. Rather, he registered his surprise at the haitch bias among celebs. Though plenty of other language guerrillas are prepared to enter the fray, to monitor the airwaves, to defend the King’s English to the nth. Grammandos, I call them. Language purists.
Maybe that’s you. As word fans, most of us are usage warriors resigned to wage our own agendas. Decimate, say, may be your line in the sand, a word that needs to keep its murder rate of one-in-10 precision. Or maybe you safeguard the honour of Princes Highway (never Princess), or daylight saving (never savings).
In my own vigil I’m dealing with the contrary mess of lucked out, a phrase now meaning fortunate as well as its antonym. Just as “on the nose”, likewise swayed by US culture, has come to mean exact – or perfect – in tandem with smelly. Untenable in a word, yet English somehow muddles on.
None of which should diminish your call of duty, be that your haitch crusade, the apostrophe feud, the less-versus-fewer skirmish. All languages need their champions, bearing in mind speakers will speak as they see fit. Functional chaos is how the system works. A point often made by Alison Moore, the Macquarie Dictionary’s chief editor, when dealing with semantic lobbyists, those keen to alter a word’s entry in the database, or strike it from the record.
Over the years, the dictionary has received appeals for bigotry to be bowdlerised, or a term like Barbie doll to shed its superficial associations. As Alison admits, “On the whole, these people have been absolutely correct in their assessment of the item(s) in question – there are many truly horrendous things in the Macquarie, but our brief is to describe Australian English, warts and all, so there they stay.”
Together, both dictionary staff and seasoned grammandos know that English will persevere for all its shames and imprecisions. As word nerds, we are less custodians of language than general carers. Constant gardeners, so to speak. Showbiz parents. We aspire to lucid expression, even if that means accepting a few aspirated aitches along the way. Mind you, the minute those spelling celebs start opting for zee over zed, then Robert Drewe and I – and maybe you too – will be grabbing our cut-out rifles and scrambling for the ramparts.
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