the (new) wh-word

[Laurence Horn]

So we (some of us, anyway) are used to worrying about wh-words in
language:  who, what, where, when, why, and their ilk.  They even
have their own wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wh-movement.
But now we have a new one:

===============
Meg Whitman Called 'Whore' By Someone In Jerry Brown's Campaign ...
I'm not one to jump to the defense of the "wh" word, but in this
case,...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Freevo/meg-whitman-whore-brown_n_755745_63190262.html

The NOW chapter of CA didn't even say what Jerry Brown and his aide
did was wrong by calling her the WH word and should apologize
https://theview.abc.go.com/forum/national-organization-women?

Is it true that someone working for Brown called Meg Whitman the wh
word (ore)? And Jerry Brown did not scold him, but went along with it?
http://www.topix.com/forum/us-governors/jerry-brown/TPNKB0FGK5A9SM84I/p22
================

Can't be "the w-word" (because of how it sounds), can't be "the
h-word" (because of how it's spelled), so it's gotta be "the
wh-word", and damn the damage to the reputation of the heretofore
perfectly wh-olesome class of interrogative and relative pronouns.
(Maybe it serves us right, given the now well-established grammatical
tradition of invoking "n-word" to refer to a member of the set of
negative-incorporated indefinites (e.g. "nobody", "nothing", "nada",
"nadie", "niente",...).

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org