The letter H - it's 'aitch' not 'haitch' - Grrr

[Lakelover]

DP insists on pronoucing it 'haitch' - drives this pedant potty.

as an abbreviation of them, I mean

Which dictionary are you using? They are in there, I promise!

"Haitch" is just horrible, and is made even more horrible by the fact that some people think it is just an acceptable "variant".

Er... Oxford Paperback Dictionary. Not mine, my colleague's.

Maybe they only appear in hardback

j-eye is just a Scottish accent thing. Haitch porobably started off that way too but it does seem to be fairly widespread.

En and Em are printing terms. En is the width of a letter 'n' in a typeface, Em is the width of 'm'. My dad was a printer .

I'm familiar with the J-eye pronounciation and also (get this!) Heytch.

Thank God I'm German...never thought I might say that.

Argh! My DH also says haitch and it drives me nuts (although I hold my tongue - picking your fights and all that ) I managed to get him to stop saying 'yous' as the plural of you but his family say it. I am slightly paranoid my DS will pick this nonsense up!

In oz people say (with a few exceptions) haitch, I don't tend to that often and i also say "eyether" instead of "eether" (either), doesn't really bother me that almost everyone else says eether. It's just a different pronounciation and can be sweet i think

According to A Plum In Your Mouth "aitch" vs. "haitch" was/is an indicator of Protestant vs. Catholic in Northern Ireland (disclaimer: I have no idea whether this is actually true).

That's interesting PortAndLemon - I'll see if dh agrees if that is also the case in the West of Scotland. As a (former) catholic, he'll have a better sense of it.

gettingserious - we're already having to correct ds to stop him saying "yous"

i do say haitch when spelling things on the phone as otherwise people seem to think i'm saying 'A'

it's not part of my normal dialect tho'

I just say "Aitch" for "Harry".

I was taught 'haitch', but them I'm Irish. I will generally use 'aitch' now because that's the dialect here, but I'll probably go back to 'haitch' when I move back to Ireland.

Interesting about Protestant vs Catholic - I'm Irish Protestant, but from the republic where Prods tend to blend in better.

I can't remember where I read this but apparently during 'The Troubles' when mad, psycho gunmen were looking for sectarian victims, they would ask them to read shop names, eg WH Smith, to find out whether they said 'haitch' or 'aitch'. It indicated whether you had been taught in a Protestant or Catholic school.

From the same source (which is going to bug me until I remember it) other psychos in the Lebanon would display a tomato to prospective sectarian victims and ask them what it was. The answer would be bandura or banadura, and again the wrong answer got you shot.

It might have been A Plum in Your Mouth. Who wrote it please (books here roughly arranged alphabetically by author)?

My Irish Catholic family said 'haitch'. So did I for years but I think when in Rome... or even England ... and now say 'aitch'.

My dh says that that is not the case in Glasgow. He would have been cliped around the ear for saying Haitch both by his local priest, where he was an alter boys and by any of the Fathers at his school (went to a Marist school)

mymblemummy -- yes, A Plum In Your Mouth. It's in our bathroom ATM so I shall report back later on authorship.