Why I ate the Haitch mob

The other day I rang a public library and asked if they had any files on a man called William Black. "Would that be William Haitch Black?" the librarian asked after due investigation. It might, and it might not, I was tempted to say; certainly he himself would have preferred William Aitch. But that would have been insufferably pedantic; so I meekly agreed. Later, on a train down from Scotland, the restaurant car, we kept being told, was located in "Carriage Haitch". And my granddaughter tells me that when she used "aitch" at school, one of her teachers insisted that the right way to say it was "haitch".

All the dictionaries in my house agree that aitch is correct. One authority, bearing the mighty imprimaturs of both Oxford University and the BBC, concedes that haitch is standard practice in Ireland but rules it out on this side of the water. Yet it seems to me, after listening closely over the past month or two, that haitch is on the march and aitch is on the retreat. Just as the pushy aggressive grey squirrel has almost extirpated the timorous red one, so muscular abrasive haitch may have done for poor gentle aitch before long.

Does that matter? Pronunciation, like all departments of language, evolves, and nowhere more so than when you deal with the letter H. In his excellent book The Adventure of English, Melvyn Bragg says there was once a primer called Poor Little H - Its Use and Abuse, which ran to 40 editions. There was a time when sounding the H at the start of some word like Hackney or Hammermith was taken to be the hallmark of education, while dropping it was the 'allmark of the unschooled. Yet even among those who prided themselves on knowing how to talk proper, the correct use of H was debatable. It's customary still to drop the H at the start of words such as honour and hour, and to prefix them with an "an"; a precious few still do the same with hotel. But standard versions of the Bible preface a whole range of words, from habitation, half and hand to husband, hymn and hypocrite, with "an" rather than "a", suggesting that the dropping of H once habitually happened too.

For centuries most people spoke as they pleased. The 18th century, lusting for standardisation, put a stop to all that. Among the first to lay down rules of what should and should not be done were two Scots, James Buchanan and William Johnston, and the playwright Sheridan, who was Irish. It was standard then to leave the L silent in words such as falter and vault, while failing to sound the R in a word such as lord or the H in a word such as while was reprehensible. One authority contended that only the Irish would rhyme great with state rather than seat, while another ordained with equal vehemence that only the Irish would rhyme it with seat.

So would the supplanting of "aitch" by "haitch" really matter? In general, I'm against those who seek to steamroller diversity out of the language, but oddly enough I think it might. The way a word begins helps define the image of what it portrays. That's why so many words of abuse begin with a B, and why a word such as spit sounds so repelling - as in Auden's threat to those who might be tempted to trespass into his private domain: "I have no gun, but I can spit."

Aitch suggests something amenable, affable, amicable, where haitch is harder, harsher, more hostile. Aitch P Sauce, I think, may be expected to seep more gently and co-operatively out of the bottle than the possibly balky and truculent Haitch P Sauce. Haitch G Wells sounds to me a more aggressive man, and writer, than Aitch G Wells. An Aitch R Aitch might be expected to proffer a limp regal handshake, where Haitch R Haitch sounds more apt for trouble in nightclubs and service in Iraq. Likewise I'd expect a more compassionate welcome from the N Aitch S than I would from the N Haitch S - a form that sounds the more unsettling because it also suggests the word "hitch".

It's notable, though, that even aggressive haitchers will still use the gentler form when it's a middle initial. A former nurse, from Wiltshire, not Ireland, to whom I was talking this week, though in all other senses a committed haitcher, referred throughout to the N Aitch S - or rather, as we all tend to do, to the N A Chess. Long may this reassuring practice continue.

· David McKie's Great British Bus Journeys is published in paperback this month McElsewhere@btinternet.com