The more change the more it's the same

I think that this winter I shall be trying to get down to the British Library because this exhibition is just up my street. It's reported here: 'I wrote 2U B4'! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century | Science | guardian.co.uk

There are a number of things in the article I enjoyed and this was a new information for me: "The well-intentioned Victorian pamphlet Poor Letter H advised its mostly lower middle class readers that if they really want to get on in life, they should be saying house, not 'ouse, and head, not 'ead. But the book also says the H should remain silent in words such as hospital and herb."
Which is presumably why Frasier (and other north Americans) talks about "drawing an 'erbal bath" -the nAm's haven't heard that Euro-Anglo's weren't convinced and so steadfastly hold to the advice to this day. I'm wondering whether it has something to do with the relatively new fad for TV presenters and others to talk about "staying at an 'otel". I was brought up to pronounce the 'h' and it seems to me that dropping it has only been seen as 'sophisticated' sometime in the last ten years or so (or did I miss something?).

Of course it also relates to that lovely piece of stupidity: school children being told to drop the initial sound (okay there are phonetic problems with that statement but let's set them aside) of 'H' so to pronounce it "aitch" rather than "haitch". I say 'stupidity', of course, because the logic is that the name of the letter should, surely, contain the sound!

Ah well: I wonder whether 'honour', 'heir' and the like will eventually acquire the H's that a number of readers will often give them?