Just seen a Currys PCWorld advert in which the presenter talks about “haitch-dee” [three mentions, so it’s no slip of the tongue]. I can’t believe nobody picked that up before they committed it to VT or whatever the F they use these days.
It’s “aitch”, you ignorant pricks.
Honestly, I can’t live on this planet any longer.
Plenty of people who ought to know better say Haitch.
Hit’s fhucking hunbelievable.
I try really hard not to get annoyed at this sort of thing, but “haitch” makes me want to scream. In my head, naturally – I’m far too Afterword to actually say anything.
I can live with most differences In pronunciation but it’s not spelt with an “h” FFS.
Advertisers have been using ‘pee’ instead of pence since, oh, I dunno, decimalisation at least. Hanging’s too good for them.
Ah! Curry’s….. that will be the company that is running an ad at the moment that shows what purports to be a PC ‘expert’ taking a Windows laptop home and then apparently getting annoyed by all the members of his family using it. Would you take advice from someone who apparently doesn’t even know how to set a password?!
And judging by the size of the house the till monkey from Curry’s lives in, and the fact he has a least three kids, I’m guessing that his wife is the breadwinner.
And top marks for calling people who work in shops ’till monkeys’. Hopefully you’ll call them that next time you’re in a shop.
It’s how we referred to each other during my 17 years in retail. I would use to a retail worker’s face though only if with eye contact and if confident of the understanding that the reference came from a place of support and shared humour.
It were Till Bunnies where I worked.
The ‘expert’ moonlights for a credit check firm too. He’s the one with the ‘talking’ boxer.
Aaarggghhhh
If he knew how to set a password he wouldn’t be working for Currys, he would be a genius in an Apple store.
Hope they didn’t announce the price as ‘nine nine five’ or something similar. We have words such as ‘hundred’, ‘pound’ and ‘and’ for good reason. Do people not understand fully worded numbers any more?
Back in my secondary school teaching days, as a minor part of my Citizenship curriculum, I used to specifically teach my fifth form class how to write numbers as words.
It never failed to amaze me how many had got as far as the fifth form without the ability to do so. It wasn’t a difficult thing for me to teach or for them to learn, but they had simply never been asked to do it up until that point.
“It’s like the top of a coat hanger”
“It’s like sideways boobs”
“It’s like part of a swastika”
“It’s like a swimmer waving goodbye as he falls down a waterfall”
“It’s nine upside down”
“It’s like an upside down nose”
“It’s just like a snowman before you add the carrot, hat, sticks and stones”
“It’s six upside down”
I’m in the mood for a moan. I agree on haitch, and can I raise “yourself” when they mean “you”?
I’ll see you… I have the various abominations that come out of people’s mouths when they are supposed to be saying the word “sixth”.
The current favourite is, literally and figuratively, “sick”
The beloved Kirsty Young gets that wrong and it jars, ever so slightly.
And to throw into the mix, people who say “myself” when they mean “me” or “I”
Add into the mix those who say “I, personally”.
Acceptable if the intention is to separate a view that you hold from the official position of an organisation that you may work for, but generally it is never used in that way.
Indeed. “Myself” is a companion horror to “yourself”.
Of course the timeless “can I get” still has me silently grinning as I hear it as “I am a bit thick”.
Are you calling Marvin Gaye thick???
Marvin moves to middle-class England:
“Awfully sorry to bother you. May I please have a witness? Only if it’s not too much trouble. No, I completely agree with you, I quite understand, my request is totally unreasonable. Sorry.”
That’s not Marvin, that’s John Le Mesurier!
“Would you fellows mind awfully telling me what is going on?”
“Would you mind awfully waking up so that one could perhaps achieve a certain amount of comfort in the form of sexual congress?”
Kirsty Young gets a pass. She can do whatever she likes.
YES! Bloody yes! Come on, you’re a professional broadcaster. Please learn how to say “sixth.”
Jeremy Paxman can’t/won’t say it.
I would threaten to overrule that.
Having spent the last week talking to IT recruitment consultants, I noticed the “yourself” issue. example: “So, I can leave that with yourself can I?”. “No, Leave that with YOU” I wanted to correct him.
I do have a new job now so that particular pain has stopped 🙂
Congratulations on the new job, Askwith. How far away is retirement.
Australians always say haitch. If you’re out for a dinner date with the Trivago lady, and you’re not sure if she’s a Kiwi or an Aussie, get her to spell something beginning with “h”. This far better than directly asking her – which absolutely all non-British people would do without giving it a second thought.
Yeah one of the many things that irritate the fuck out of me about Australia is the use of “haitch”
Tell me, AW folk up there in the mother country, do you pronounce this little fella * as an asterisk or an Asterix?
The former.
I pronounce it asterisk because that’s its name, which you can tell cos it’s spelled like that. 😊
I heart you, Bob.
‘It’s’? tsk tsk (Writes the man who can barely write a sentence without at least two typos.)
It’s? God, can’t you even TYPE or SEE, man?
*muttley laugh*
You need a sick sense for that.
If you pronounce it Asterix, then it’s a bit of an own Gaul.
Always say haitch in Australia? Not around here. I suspect there is a similar socio-economic divide in pronunciation in Oz and the UK.
Now, why do some Americans pronounce ‘herb’ with a silent ‘h’, like they’re just about to bust into a Cockney musical number?
“… there a mystery as to why certain pronunciations cause such strong feeling. Take the eighth letter of the alphabet, pronounce it haitch and then look for the slightly agonised look in some people’s eyes.
One suggestion is that it touches on a long anxiety in English over the letter aitch. In the 19th Century, it was normal to pronounce hospital, hotel and herb without the h. Nowadays “aitch anxiety” has led to all of them acquiring a new sound, a beautifully articulated aitch at the beginning. America has perhaps hung on to its aitchless herb because it has less class anxiety attached to pronunciations.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11642588
Removing the H from hotel, hospital & herb changed them to starting with a vowel, where the convention is to proceed them with “an” rather than “a’.
leading on: I think “a” and “aitch” can sound similar in various dialects so giving a hard H avoids confusion – Doesn’t excuse Idris Elba in the Sky “haitch dee” ads
fewer class anxiety.
Onestly.
I don’t say ‘Haitch’. Born in Dalby, Queensland. I want to correct that error.
Can’t say I’ve noticed it in SE QLD either.
However: why in Oz is maroon (the colour) pronounced ‘maroan’, while maroon (as on a desert island) pronounced ‘maroon’, eh? Eh?
I worked with a guy who had lived and worked in Australia for many years – not only did we get ‘haitch’ but he always pronounced project as PROject, as in pronoun (not that he knew what they were). Needless to say, he was a PROject manager….and an idiot….not that I hated him or anything…..
EVERYBODY in Oz says PROject. It’s the law, I assume.
I’ve no idea where it came from – I first heard it in the UK in the late 80s from a colleague who was somewhere on the tosspot spectrum. I first assumed it was American, but it isn’t really: they say prarject. Perhaps it’s uniquely Australian?
Do ALL Americans say ‘prarject’? You may be right, but I’m pretty sure most of them say ‘PRO-dooce’ instead of ‘prod-yoose’ – when, actually, they really mean ‘vegetables’.
We had a welsh (IT) wizard at work who said PROject. It may be a welsh. He also said templet instead of template. Some of the english as 2nd language folk started copying both.
‘Tosspot spectrum’ – excellent, I’m going to use that!
At the risk of sounding like a dim colonial, where does one put the emphasis if not on the first syllable?
Confused of Adelaide.
I think they mean saying “proe-ject” instead of “proh-ject”, rather than a different emphasis.
Unless of course one is projecting something*, in which case it would be proJECT!
*hi Moose
Hel-LO…..
Project is prod-ject, innum?
Template is also temp-let down here on the Somerset Badlands.
In NI it’s seemingly some kind of religious indicator – whether you say haitch or aitch. Similar to calling one ‘community’ left-footers, or other stupid names. I can’t recall which is which. I’ve always said haitch and I don’t care who has a problem with that.
Bugger. Now I’ve got the read all your posts by Colin Haitch.
Down south you’d be considered some sort of “La-de-da Gunner Graham”-type if you said “aitch”. See also medicine pronounced as two syllables..
I recall that very rare thing – a funny cartoon from Punch in the 30s
(We are on a country road. Ragged-looking working class oik on a bike, shaking a fist at at posh woman driving an open-topped car)
He shouts “Sound yer ‘orn!”
She speeds past, saying “Sound your aitches”
The state of H down under,,,
It’s why Steps broke up
Grown adults who say and write “brought” when they mean “bought”, and vice versa.
E.g. “I brought some records and bought them home”.
That gets my goat, too, as do adults (who really ought to know better) who use “less” when they mean “fewer”.
For all my life it has been “haitch” and I’m not about to change.
Why do you presume upon your own correctness? Is there a National Pronunciation Committee which you chair, that I have been heretofore completely unaware of?
My own feeling is that “aitch” is an unnecessary affectation, as is saying “”otel” rather than hotel, beginning with a “huh”.
So not adding a letter to the beginning of a word is affectation? Surely the reason this particular issue annoys some people is that it’s not about pronunciation per se. There IS no “H” at the beginning of the word “aitch”.
“Hotel” does actually have an “h” at the beginning of the word so I agree that dropping it off in speech would be an affectation.
If you want to stress the syllables in word differently from me, that’s fine, but this is adding something that’s not there. I speak on this as a person who’s GLW has said “haitch” for the whole of the 36 years I’ve known her and also isn’t about to change. For 36 years I’ve wanted to correct her at least once a day, but I’m not that stupid.
I don’t know about a National Pronunciation Committee, but there is a National Curriculum, where primary school children learn their letters. I’m fairly certain that teaching kids to say “haitch” isn’t part of it, nor hay, hee, hi, ho or hyou.
“Hyou” is a word used by police constables and drill sergeants.
As in, “‘Ello ‘ello ‘ello, what are hyou a-doin’ of in dis ‘ere warehouse, young feller-me-lad?”
and, “Roight, hyou ‘orrible lot!”
Hyou is a Welsh thing, you racist.
That’s Mr Edwards to you, and please don’t refer to him as a “thing”.
*sneers*
Lookit this “article” from last week’s Daily Mirror. How is this possible? Do online newspapers not employ proof-readers at all? Its rong!
Your write. It comprises of various mistakes.
Bring back rpoof readers, I say!
Indeed!
Carved vegetables! How novel!
Actually celery stalks is equally disturbing. Puts me in mind of Day of the Triffids.
Snack tomatoes and cucumbers..? Who snacks on bloody cucumbers??Presumably this means ‘small’…like ‘fun size’ chocolate bars. I guess ‘fun size cucumbers’ would have been too open to ribald asides in the veg aisle…
I’ve proof read that and found nothing wrong.
Really?
How long ’til retirement, tigger?
Don’t you mean proofread?
“WOULD OF” !!!! What is that all about ?????
Irregardless of your position on that, I could care less.
Me either.
Then there’s this…
‘Newcular’ as in ‘newcular power’ is the one that makes my blood boil.
Richard Osman is guilty of this.
But I can forgive him most things.
Ooooh, me too. I scrolled this far down looking for the newcular option. Even the damn BBC announcers say it. If I was the Controller I’d sack them on the spot. Really, just sack them, for being too bloody lazy and stupid to work for the BBC.
READ THE WORD YOU DOLTS, now pronounce what you read.
If you get it so wrong that you introduce a syllable that ISN’T REALLY THERE we don’t want to trust any other syllables that spout from your ignorant gob. So jog on.
I’ll see you on a Wensday in Febuary.
In the libary?
Probly.
is it possible to write a sentence with no punctuation and it still make sense.
some peeple think you can im not convinced
Ask Samuel Beckett. Or ask someone who’s read it, rather. How It Is (his last novel) has no punctuation at all.
Newsreaders doing regional pronounciations
N
“Newcastle” said by an Oxford educated southern born BBC Newsreader just sounds forced, and a bit wrong
What’s wrong with saying ‘Newcastle’? Should they be saying ‘N’yaCASSel’ or something like that? There’s a Newcastle in Northern Ireland and it’s known as ‘Newcastle’ – as in ‘new’ and ‘castle’, no funny business necessary.
Mind you, hearing national newsreaders trying to pronounce names of minor Northern Ireland locations – on the odd occasion that there’s a national story involving such places – is painful. I remember one story involving Maghera (pronounced: Ma-her-ah) and newsreaders strangling it to death (Mageeera).
Poor old Victoria Coren – probably not as clever as she thinks she is – pronounced ‘Fleadh Cheoil’ in ‘Only Connect’ a week or two back – in a question about all-Ireland entities – as Fla Coil. Okay, it’s another language but she had ages to prepare, presumably. It’s pronounced ‘Fla Cyoal’.
The i newspaper (which I’ve quite taken to recently) introduced a new word puzzle a couple of weeks back. It involves completing a grid based on guessing words that either rhyme with, mean the same as, or are the same as (bar one letter) as a word already given. All good fun – but I’ve noticed something about the ‘rhyme’ aspect: you have to think in London English. Last week they rhymed ‘pork’ with ‘talk’. In most of Northern Ireland ‘talk’ is pronounced tawwk – not a million miles away from ‘dog’, with a slightly elongated ‘aw’ sound. Meanwhile, in NI, ‘pork’ is pronounced ‘pork’.
It took me longer than usual to finish The Guardian crossword on Saturday because I had to work out that in my final clue the setter thought that ‘sure’ was a homophone of ‘shore’.
Sarah Montague says that all the time. That’s on the Today Programme, on BBC Radio 4, that alleged bastion of good English usage, where you can also find weatherman Philip Avery talking about “the odd bit and piece” and “the odd drib and drab” of rain. That’s when the rain isn’t organised of course.
I’d so love to wake up to music. Or the birds. Or the Byrds.
Yes, ‘organised showers’ – what the actual fuck is an organised shower? One that has been ordered and is on time..?
The i paper’s word puzzle has done it again: today, it rhymes ‘walk’ with ‘cork’. I mean, for God’s sake…
Er…
They do rhyme in standard British English. The Cambridge Eng. Dic. gives the pronunciation of walk as /wɔːk/ and cork as /kɔːk/.
We’d better tell Kirsty Wark – she can change her name immediately to Kirsty Walk.
I’ve presaged everything above with what NI pronunciation is. Walk is like the surname of Evelyn Waugh with a -k on the end.
Tell me the Cambridge Dicto doesn’t say we should pronunce his name ‘war’.
Kingsley Amis used to tell a story about meeting Waugh, who addressed him as ‘Ames’.
‘Er, Amis, actually.’ he said.
‘Nonsense, it’s Ames,’ came the reply from the Great Man.
Worked for 14 years in a place named for Sir Ian Wark – and it was indeed pronounced “walk”…still, here in South Oz we get stick for pronouncing words like charnce, darnce, carstle or photograrph, unless the rest of our antipodean brethren.
Good to know I’m lining up with South Australia instead of just being a stuffy Pom. Mrs thep gets ants in her pants if there’s a chantse for a dantse.
I’m a bit confused as to your complaint, Colin. Are you saying that the newspaper should provide an NI-specific word puzzle with clues tailored to your particular regional pronunciation?
Also, all of your examples (war-k, walk, Wark, Waugh-k, cork, talk, pork) DO rhyme, and no matter how you try to explain it by writing down the NI pronunciation, I still can’t hear the difference.
Worst of all though: I now can’t get the word spork out of my head. SPORK!
This may enlighten our r-dropping readers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
Thanks for making it clea-ah, my dea-ah!
(In Suffolk that would be “cleeyah moi deeyah”.)
@minibreakfast
On TV programmes they never ever get the east anglian accent right….always comes across as West Country. Gets on my nerves.
Yes Mini, I’m DEMANDING that the i newspaper’s puzzles editor tailors his word puzzles solely to soft NI pronunciation (i.e. mine)! 🙂
Actually, from this discussion I’ve learned that, seemingly, most of the UK – or most of England anyway – pronounces ‘walk’ ‘talk’ like ‘pork’. I didn’t know that – I assumed it was just London-ish/Essex-ish.
Perhaps they could also do one for the Newcastle area. I bet you’d excel at that…
Can you just imagine the clues?
Clue: Popular greeting in the Newcastle area (38)
Answer: Hoooooooooooooowaaaaaaaaaaaaayyaboogaman
Mrs M hails from Northumberland and only ever uses Howay to mean “hurry up!”
So I hear that a lot.
…er…
Actually, I was in NyaCASSel a couple of months back and the funniest thing – I was standing at a bar having just placed an order, not many people in, and somebody else walks (waaarrrks) up to the bar. He stands there a while and then says, seemingly to himself ‘Whyeaye’. A couple of minutes later he’s served. As far as I can see, the ‘Whyaye’ served no pup[ose whatsover – it wasn’t loud enough to get the barman’s attention. He must have been agreeing with something he was thing!
I can confirm that in Yorkshire it’s all walk, talk and pork. In that order.
Indeed. No pork until the third date.
Well, I don’t know about dictionaries but, my mother grew up in Edinburgh with neighbours called Waugh and she always said their name in the same way as they did, which meant pronouncing the last two letters, not leaving them silent as Evelyn Waugh did. It’s hard to reproduce on the page, but the gh sounded similar to the way Scots would say the ch at the end of loch. I wonder if Wark is a variant on the same name.
However, I don’t think anybody would have dared to “correct” Evelyn Waugh on this point.
Worg…. what is it good for?
This might just be a Scottish thing but it’s fairly common to hear the letter J pronounced “jie” (rhyming with die) instead of jay. So sometimes you hear the kids doing the alphabet “…haitch eye jie kay…”. Horrible.
Nothing could be worse than Jay Kay.
The Derry/Londonderry pronunciation is extraordinary. I’m sure most people in GB think the NI accent (actually, there’s several accents – a bit like having speech equivalents of, say, Yorkshire, Merseyside, Devon, etc. all lumped into one tight space) is bloody awful, but in many ways, including vowel pronunciation, Derry is a kind of separate entity from the rest of NI, e.g. ‘one’ is pronounced ‘waan’, ‘Derry’ is pronounced ‘Deery’.
Could of, would of, should of etc And the one that really annoys me is “Loose” instead of “Lose”
Lose/loose is the only language error that annoys me. As a former English language teacher and now in a job working with colleagues from every continent and most countries, I’ve got used to Globish. But that one is incoherent, as it confuses two separate words.
Having just returned from the Rhins o’Galloway, much fun was had asking my wife to read out some of the signposts on the way there. Kircudbright gave most fun, ahead of Haugh of Urr.
Slightly off topic, and probably won’t really work well when written down, but I used to work with a Glaswegian girl who simply couldn’t say ‘Purple burglar alarm’ without nearly strangling herself. Luckily it wasn’t a phrase that cropped up very often when performing business analysis.
Similarly, my GLW, who is Bristolian, always lapses into pure yokel if she has to say ‘car park’.
Similarly, my Scots-born French-raised GLW struggles with “thistle”. Her Johnny Foreigner accent comes to the fore, and it comes out as “Zizzel”.
Fo shizzle?
Fo Brizzle.
Cheers, droive.
Chief among my annoyances is the seemingly universal use of ‘uni’ instead of university. Particularly galling when used by people who are actually at, or went to, bloody university.
Or went to, lord help us polytechnical colleges…….
General term for university here in NZ is “Varsity”.
Hmmm … interesting. The word ‘Varsity’ isn’t used a great deal in Britain, I don’t think , with the exception of “The Varsity Match”, which is an annual rugby match between Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
Of course, I could be wrong, as I haven’t lived in the UK for 29 years. One gets so out of touch.
Yes, I thought varsity referred to specifically Oxford v Cambridge competitions – I knew about the rugby match but chess games, tiddlywinks, korfball between the two universities would be varsity matches, apart from the boat race.
I know Google has the answer probably, but where’s the fun in that?
The Varsity is also Cambridge’s oldest (and poshest) restaurant, currently sandwiched between All Bar One and Nando’s.
A good celeb-spotting haunt for those with deep pockets.
I’m all for regional accents on TV, but I just heard Look East’s Essex reporter say “twen’y faahsand paahnd”. He could at least have put an s on the end of pound.
Re: “twen’y faahsand paahnd”
That rather reminds me of the first few seconds of this vintage interview with the Kray twins.
The letters E and D seem to have fallen off many an adjective. Once upon a time, I might have been renowned for being tanned and buffed, if not a little biased. Nowadays, I am renown for being tan and buff, though bias.
The way things are going, that sitcom talking horse will be called Mister.
Whither Dy Grant?
Once upon a time I worked in a hotel kitchen and a new trainee chef called Jamie, from the Welsh valleys, came to work with us. We had lots of fun teasing him about his accent.
Q: “What are those two things on the sides of your head, Jamie?”
A: “My yers.”
Q: “What does 24 months make, Jamie?”
A: “Two yers.”
Q: “Where are you standing at the moment, Jamie?”
A: “I’m standing yer in the kitchen.”
This post should be on the joke thread.
A very common one is to pronounce Scalextric as Scalectrix – always annoyed me ever since childhood, but then I am old enough to remember Scalex cars before they were electrified!
Can’t stand it when people are laxydaisical with language.
As with that thread about things we can do without, it occurs to me that we’ve had such fun moaning about language mistakes that it’s a wonder we haven’t had this kind of thread before 😉