Dropping your 8th letters

[sawyl]

Today's Guardian featured an article on the 8th letter of the alphabet which, with it's multiple pronunciations, provides yet another opportunity to those who want to pour scorn on the linguistic origins of others. In my case, I tend to describe something as an historic event, talk about an hotel room and say that a particular machine may be an HP-UX server, I suspect that I only do so because of my bizarre upbringing and the fact that I'm too lazy to aspirate the first letter. At least I don't, as my pater does, as talk about riding an horse, of if I do, I do so unintentionally...