sounds, secrets and breathy aitches

I nearly crashed my car the other afternoon.
I was driving home from the West Country and listening to radio 2. The music stopped and a pleasant, female voice chimed out one of the many commercials that litter the BBC's airwaves these days.
I can't remember precisely what programme or presenter the commercial was plugging. I tend to tune out when these things are broadcast. But, I do remember that I almost swerved off the road when she added the strap line "..... the sound to your Sunday morning".
The sound TO your Sunday morning.
What the hell sort of language is that? Who wrote it? More to the point, who, charged with the job of editing it, allowed such meaningless drivel to be broadcast?
I wanted to call the Beeb - as I frequently do - to complain. I wanted to take the announcer - or preferably the writer/editor - gently by the throat and explain that there is no such construction in the English language as "the sound to". Unfortunately, I was driving, I was in a hurry and, truthfully, too apathetic to pull off the road and make the call on my mobile.
So, I let it go. And it has rankled ever since.
But really, how could anyone with English as a first language feel comfortable with such a construction. Imagine writing a diary entry that began: The day was fine and filled with the sound to the birds singing. UURGGH.
Why are people not only being allowed to mangle our language on a daily basis but, what's worse, being paid to do so? Is it out of some mis-guided sense of trendyness? Does it denote lack of interest or affection for the language?Or are they simply ignorant ? Whatever the reason, its effect is grating in the extreme.
It was probably around three or four years ago that I first noticed this trend. Like many linguistic horrors it seems to have originated in America.
The carrier of this particular virus was an ad for a shampoo or hair treatment which promised to provide " the secret TO glossy hair" or something equally specious. It made me grind my teeth then and, just writing it, makes me grind them even now. In any event, such is the power of the broadcast word, whether on TV, radio or the WWW, that "the secret TO" rapidly established itself. It infests evry form of the written word but seems to be particularly prevalent in women's magazines, which regularly promise to reveal the secret to bikini figures, workplace romances, perfect teeth, summer diets and buiness success. The people who write and edit these sections are only outdone in their air-headeness by the people who actually choose to read them.
Another hair-tearing construction that pops up all the time is Bored OF or Fed-Up OF. In fact, it's been around so long that, nowadays, when people find things or other people tedious they are just as likely to anoounce that they are Bored Of them as the rest of us are to be bored with them.
But, these prepositional aberrances pale in comparison with the modern insistence on inserting the letter aitch into the word aitch so that it ends up being pronounced as Haitch.
My bank is called HSBC. Or at least, that is how I have always thought of it. Not any more, though, if a young man that I talked to the other day is to be believed. No, according to him, the correct title of my bank is Haitch SBC with a very breathy emphasis on the H inserted at the beginning of the word.
I tried - and dismally failed - to explain to him that the company's name was HSBC with no aitch sound at the beginning. What I actually said was " There is no aitch in the aitch of HSBC". The surreal nature of that opening never really dissipated. The debate that followed progressed rapidly downhill. We might justt as well have been discussing some obscure grammatical construction in Serbo Croat for all the effect my argument had. Suffice to say that the young lad went away convinced that I was either some kind of nutter or that I was the unfortunate victim of a distinctly sub-standard education. For my part, I had to retire to a darkened room and rub myself down gently with a copy of Usage and Abusage.