Posted on 01/05/2015 12:50:21 PM PST by rightistight
In an article called “The history of “wh”: a microaggression,” a Princeton student has called out those who question his pronunciation of “cool whip” as offensive and perpetrators of a microaggression.
The piece was written by “Newby Patton,” who is listed as a Contributing Columnist by the paper.
In “The History of ‘wh,'” Patton explains the pain he has gone through during his life when people notice that he pronounces “wh” with a heavy “h” sound.
He never questioned how he pronounced “wh” before he came to college. Now, according to Patton, he is being mercilessly mocked by class students.
“My peers make a spectacle of it,” Patton painfully recounts. “‘Say Cool Whip,’ they’ll tell me… I’ll say ‘Cool Whip.’ They’ll repeat it back to me with exaggerated emphasis on the /h/. I’ve been pulled into this conversation several times now, and each time I grow a bit more self-conscious.”
At first Patton thought it was okay because he is a white male and because he is a white male he “gets less than my fair share of discrimination.” But then he realized that he was suffering from microaggression.
(Excerpt) Read more at thepunditpress.com ...
What he needs is some good old fashioned macro-aggression. That should shut him up.
Ha Ha, first thing I thought of.
Umm ...
I have not read the earlier posts. I apologize if someone else made the same point: This must be a satire.
We used to just say that someone was making fun of us.
And no one cared.
Life went on.
.
I had a friend who was upper crust hoi poloi, Nob Hill, and she insisted that “which” is pronounced differently than “witch,” “where” is pronounced differently than “wear,” etc., the difference being that “wh” is pronounced with a pursed-lips “whoosh” sound.
Sounded bizzare to me at first, but eventually I saw her point.
Ed
P.S. I loved the writer’s satire, though...it was funny!
Apparently this “microagression” is something you use to piss off very small people.
Interestingly enough, he is actually pronouncing it correctly. In words such as “whip” or “whisper”, “w” is a vowel and the “h” is not silent. Few of us actually talk that way, but it is grammatically correct.
I hope I am correct in assuming that this supposed victim of “micro-aggression” is putting one out there to snag the victimology crowd.
It is my understanding that in many parts of the country “wh” was at one time actually pronounced inverted, as something like “hwut” for “what”. It is still pronounced that way in some regions, but not in most.
The modern English "what" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "hwaet" (meaning "Lo!" or "Listen!"... see my tagline). Even then it was pronounced "wat", with a slight aspiration before the w sound as the only reference to the h. So any dialects that pronounced "what" as "h-wut" created that sound sequence rather than reflected any original pronunciation...
At first Patton thought it was okay because he is a white male and because he is a white male he “gets less than my fair share of discrimination.”
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
I am very sorry this wasn’t the FIRST line.
I would have stopped there and not wasted the nanoseconds of my life that I squandered on this ridiculous bunk....
Yep, exactly. It was one of the things tested for in the various Linguistic Atlas studies starting in the 1930s. If I remember right, WH was prevalent in New England and in the South. Dropping it was common in Pennsylvania and the Midland.
I believe WH has been steadily losing ground since then.
Thanks for the clarification.
Your tagline is Anglo-Saxon? Old English?
See post 70 for another linguistic take.
I think you are spot on.
Worse. We are now actively encouraging otherwise sane people to turn into self-hating, perpetually aggrieved “someone called me a name” narcissists.
Yes. Old English and Anglo-Saxon are the same thing. My particular area of most familiarity is in the Wessex (West Saxon) dialects circa 950ish. My tagline translates as “Knowledge is the greatest treasure, truly!”
Okay, thanks.
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