An Essayist's Notebook

English has rules, but English also has music. Most of the time the rules win, because they’re easier to print, easier to teach, and easier for software to enforce. But every so often the music insists on being heard.

Take the small matter of an hotel.

I was taught, in a school founded in 1180, by Oxford and Cambridge dons who cared about the shape of a sentence, that the indefinite article follows sound, not spelling. If a word begins with a weak or elided h, you avoid the hiatus and use an. That’s how I learned an historical, an heroic, an humble, and yes, an hotel.

Irish English makes this even more natural. We’re comfortable with a softened h, with liaison, with smoothing the vowel transitions. And we’re comfortable with prosody doing the work. When the stress of the sentence falls on the verb, the noun relaxes:

I am staying in an hotel.

The h weakens, the article shifts, and the phrase flows as one unit: in an‑hotel.

But when the emphasis moves, when the point is the location rather than the action, the aspiration returns:

I am staying, in a hotel.

The noun stands up straight, the h is sounded, and the article changes with it.

This is not archaism. It is not affectation. It is simply English behaving like a spoken language rather than a printed one. Modern editors and AI models flatten this distinction because they assume a fixed, fully aspirated h in all contexts. They enforce the majority usage, not the minority music.

But the minority music is still mine.

And in An Essayist’s Notebook, a place for noticing how language actually works in the mouth, not just on the page, it deserves to be written down.