Sick of Being Pied? Be More Umble…

And Stop Kicking Off[al] Online!

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We’ve been having the ‘aitch’ versus ‘haitch’ debate for over two thousand years and we still can’t agree to disagree. It is quite Britishly pathetic.

Mumsnet and Reddit are full of unnecessarily extreme comments from people criticising the use of ‘haitch’. One poster even added, ‘I will die on this hill and I will die alone if need be’. Another wrote, ‘One is right (and has a dictionary definition) and one is wrong and makes you sound stupid’. In reality, most of us do actually know the rules but prefer to save tearing our hair out for truly diabolical problems. Or, we just don’t care that much.

I prefer ‘aitch’ and – seemingly ironically – I don’t often drop my aitches. This is not a typo, or a divisive statement about H-dropping¹. I use the voiceless glottal fricative [h] but it is perfectly valid not to do so. Shibboleths of class such as H-dropping are subjective and do not define the capabilities, identity or value of a person.

In Northern Ireland, different pronunciations demarcated the religious divide. ‘Haitch’ and ‘aitch’ are still sometimes associated with Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively. Some anecdotal evidence points to ‘haitch’ having made its way to Australia with Irish Catholic teachers in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Immigrants to Australia were predominantly working class and, according to folk etymology, ‘haitch’ therefore had proletarian connotations as well as Irish and Catholic-educated ones. It is seldom possible to be judgemental about an accent in isolation; it is almost always going to run deeper than the five mechanical elements of an accent, namely stress, intonation, rhythm, pitch, and pronunciation.

Drop It Like It’s ‘Ot

Aitch-dropping is a multifaceted concept requiring a nuanced understanding of various aspects of language. Our propensity to retain or drop the [h] relies on much more than how many times we’ve watched Michael Caine in The Italian Job. Dialectal variation, social dynamics, individualities, historical influences, and perpetual linguistic change are just some of the factors at play. We learn nothing more from a person’s H’s than we do from their clothing or hairstyle.

Thankfully, most of us now know better than Dickens’ Mr Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, who remarked: ‘In England, Angleterre, England, We Aspirate the “H”, and We Say “Horse”. Only our Lower Classes Say “Orse!”‘. Nowadays, if you mumble and drop the ‘h’ from ‘humble’, enunciating /ˈʌmbᵊl/, it’s highly likely to go unquestioned. This is partly because we now accept H-dropping and appreciate accent diversity. It’s also because we no longer use the word ‘umble’, meaning that different pronunciations of its six-letter counterpart result in zero-to-little ambiguity. Whether you hear /ˈʌmbᵊl/ or /’hʌmbᵊl/, the meaning will likely be something along the lines of ‘not proud or arrogant; modest’.

Some closed-minded Podsnappian University Challenge viewers force-fed a slice of unsavoury humble pie to Amol Rajan merely because they were disgruntled by [what the OED classes as] a valid pronunciation of a letter. I maintain that they are out of order. As Michael Rosen puts it, ‘When people object to the way others speak, it rarely has any linguistic logic. It is nearly always because of the way that a particular linguistic feature is seen as belonging to a cluster of disliked social features.’ In the case of ‘h’, there are many social implications that fuel these complaints, even subconsciously. As seen in the aforementioned Mumsnet examples, ‘haitch’ can have connotations of benightedness that result in unnecessarily angry, rude and snobbish behaviour.

Accent Bias

Accent bias remains an overlooked problem. In the UK, accent (like social class) is not protected by the Equality Act 2010. This means that it can act as a proxy for other types of discrimination, such as racism, classism, ableism and ageism. Human cognition dictates that accents trigger social stereotypes. This only becomes problematic when we, consciously or unconsciously, judge people based on the links we make between stereotypes and accents.

There is a distinct lack of research specifically focussing on accent bias but Accent Bias Britain found that accents of working class speakers, Northern industrial towns, and minority ethnicity groups were regarded as less prestigious by British people. Even when the content of interview responses was identical, working class and minority ethnic accents were associated with lower professional expertise and competence. Listeners over 45 years of age, from higher classes, and based in the South of England were more likely to exercise these forms of bias.

Accent Anxiety

Data collected for the Speaking Up: Accents and Social Mobility report demonstrate that ‘social class, region, and ethnicity affect whether a person feels anxious that their accent may impede their professional progress, feels a compromised sense of belonging, and has experienced mocking or singling out of their accent in workplace and social settings’. It was also highlighted that self-consciousness and anxiety reach a peak towards the end of Higher Education when students are seeking entry points into a career. According to the report, earlier in life, one’s region of origin increases accent anxiety, particularly in the North and the Midlands, whereas later in life, social class differences become the most important factor in accent-related career anxiety and occurrences of accent bias. This might be explained by experiences of having one’s accent corrected and commented upon or having to attend elocution lessons to eradicate traces of a particular accent. It is also conceivable that the underrepresentation of certain accents in positions of authority contributes to feelings of anxiety for those who use an accent far removed from Received Pronunciation (RP). Accent Bias Britain found that less than 10% of the British population speak RP but, despite efforts to diversify, it is still used by around 70% of newsreaders.

You Aren’t What You Eat: Humble Pie Omits Humility

The terms ‘umbles’ and ‘humble’ are etymologically unrelated. You could liken them to doppelgängers Emily Mackay and Margot Robbie. Both pairs bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, yet have completely different roots. In both cases, the latter is perhaps more famous and popular than the former, at least at present, but this might change. The fact that ‘umble’ and ‘humble’ have appeared with and without the initial [h] between the 15th and 19th centuries – despite their disparate meanings – has bound to have caused confusion. It is purported that since the /h/ sound was (and continues to be) dropped in many dialects, the phrase ‘umble pie’ was hypercorrected and became the corruption ‘humble pie’. We no longer use the word ‘umble’ but ‘humble pie’ does carry the fossilised word ‘umble’ as an idiom.

We could all learn a lesson from this. Don’t correct someone unless it’s absolutely necessary. You might pee them off, and they might just pie you off. Language is more complicated than most of us like to admit and, despite most teachers doing their best, it’s not like the UK education system has done a great job of explaining it to us, either. Now, back to this hors menu‘ umble pie’…

Nom[b], Nom[b], Nom[b]… Everything’s In Apple-Pie Order

If you haven’t yet wished that I shut my pie hole, read on for some finer etymological details. The ‘(h)umble’ in ‘humble pie’ comes from Old French word nombles. Nombles derives from the Latin lumbulus (a diminutive of lumbus) and means ‘loins’ or lombles in French. It is unrelated to ‘humble’ which is from from Latin humilis. We can trace the word back to the Proto-Indo-European word lendh (‘loin of meat’), which became the Proto-Italic londwos, and then came lumbus in Latin, retaining the meaning ‘loin’. The conjugation lumulus heavily influenced the development of the French word nombles, specifically referring to ‘beef, veal, or venison’. The French don’t care for the first syllable of a word as much as us Germanic speakers so this is probably how the ‘n’ was pied off (- get it?) in favour of the new word umble (meaning the gross insides of animals). Poorer people had to eat these disgusting ‘umbles’ and so ‘eating humble pie’ pertained to coming from a modest background. The ‘umble pie’ pun was an absolute gift for word lovers in the nineteenth century. Seeing as though the whole phrase described a humble background, and ‘umble’ sounded remarkably similar to ‘humble’, simply adding an ‘h-‘ was a quick win! In this instance, creativity and wordplay won. We still use humble pie to this day instead of its etymologically-correct counterpart ‘numble pie’.

I hope that scratched an etymological aitch for you.

TL;DR: Be humble or umble when you interact with others unless you aspire to be like Mr Podsnap.

1. H-dropping ironically, often pronounced aitch-dropping /ˈeɪʧ ˈdrɒpɪŋ(g)/) ↩︎