For a start, they are irrational. People have a hard time explaining why “haitch” is wrong or bad. Often it is just a bodily response. But emotions like disgust and contempt mess with our critical faculties and lead us to ignore reason and instead go with our gut. It is easy to imagine that caller’s mother rejecting a job applicant because they said “haitch”. But why use such a superficial signal as a basis for determining a person’s true qualifications and capacities? It is not just discriminatory, but the haitch-hating employer may be depriving themselves of the best candidate for the job.

Similarly, the person who turns off the radio because they can’t stand to hear people say “haitch ess see” is depriving themselves of information and insights that they would normally find useful.

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The problem gets worse when our feelings about language lead us to threaten violence over how others pronounce their words—independent of the content of what they are saying. This ranges from convent girls getting the ruler for saying “haitch”, to people being taken off planes for speaking Arabic on their phones, to people being beaten up in the street for conversing in a community language.

The licence to feel disgust or hate towards a way of speaking, and an entitlement to punish that way of speaking, is easily transferred from quibbles over pronunciation all the way to the suppression of entire languages. Someone who says that haitch-sayers should be silenced or sanctioned is using the same form of irrational and intolerant reasoning that has led to minority languages, and their associated social identities, going into hiding.