8th letter of the basic Latin alphabet
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This morning my wife asked me how to spell the letter H. I said it is spelled H. She said it is spelled A-I-T-C-H and pointed me to a website. I am deeply disturbed by this. Here are my arguments against using letters to "spell letters."
1- If H is spelled aitch then why isn't it spelled aitcaitcaitcaitcaitcaitcaitcaitc... forever and ever?
2- The written H came before the written aitch. It's not a chicken or egg problem. Therefore why complicate a glorified hieroglyph with more glorified hieroglyphs?
3- If there is confusion about what letter is being used, we have a NATO phonetic alphabet to add clarity.
Spelling letters with more letters overcomplicates things and drives me crazy. Change my view.
There are such things as pronunciation guides, which are basically sets of made-up words used to stand for the letters of an alphabet to show how they should be sounded, but these show all letters, not just 'H'. To my knowledge, there is no special word for 'H' that would make it unique from all other letters, and I think you are mistaken.
The only reason why I can think you might believe 'H' is the only letter to have its own phonetic spelling may be because it seems to be discussed more than most, firstly for the reason you quote, namely that some people mistakenly "drop" the letter when pronouncing words that begin with it (eg "I'm 'ungry!"), and secondly, because there are some disagreements over the pronunciation of the letter 'H' - in some regional dialects, natives pronounce it "aitch" while others say "haitch" (the former is considered to be the correct, scholarly pronunciation).
For these reasons there is arguably more discussion over the pronunciation of this letter than any other (or at least a close second to the "zee" and "zed" variations of the letter 'Z') so you may well have seen 'H' represented phonetically more than any other.
In response to OP's specific reference "drop one's aitches":
If I were to write this myself after hearing someone say it I would write "Drop one's h's" as spelling out the names of letters phonetically is very uncommon in writing. This phrase refers to not pronouncing the "H" sound at the beginning of some words (ex. (h)erb vs. herb).
I would follow the same pattern and type:
"cross your t's and dot your i's" as opposed "cross your tees and dot your eyes"
The second is sort of ambiguous and might be used in a humorous way.
First of all I'm not confused about how this letter is pronounced. I've been taught it's the former pronunciation all along and none of the dictionaries recognise the latter. But I observed there has been an increasing surge of people, many YouTubers included, that adopted the /heɪtʃ/ pronunciation, which vexed me to no end. I even saw some teachers of English pronounced the letter like that, which is alarming to say the least.
The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes has the question, "How do you pronounce the letter 'H'?"
Their current results:
aitch (85%)
haitch (12%)
I use something else (2%)
You can see a clearer (and navigable) image of this response map at the link above by registering and taking the survey:
According to the OALD, the standard way to pronounce the H is this one, which is without the "H" sound in its pronunciation.
Although on Wikipedia, it says there is also the other pronunciation (with the "H" sound at the beginning) which, anyway, is considered to be nonstandard.