Taking the high road to discovering 'w' as a vowel

My little girl was doing her English homework the other day, diligently going through the vowel sequence.

"a,e,i,o,u," she gets to the end, adding, "and sometimes 'y' ". I corrected her: " Sometimes 'y' and 'w' -- you forgot 'w'!". She laughed, "Oh, Daddy, 'w' isn't a vowel!" I countered, " Yes, it is. Someone obviously forgot to put it in there."

As with most of my profound statements, no one believed me. My wife is an English major and she thought I was insane. I asked my daughter to go tell the teacher, " My dad says 'w' is a vowel and all the SOLs in the world won't change that." But she refused. Maybe it was for the best. A prophet is never accepted in his hometown.

I recall distinctly being taught the vowel sequence in third grade and 'w' was indeed listed. How could I forget the inevitable moment when we asked our teacher what word could possibly use 'w' as a vowel. She had absolutely no idea! But in those days you knew never to repeat questions the teacher could not answer. I may have asked one more adult about the 'w' but was quickly reprimanded for asking stupid questions.

If you even say the letter 'w' nowadays, people think you are speaking of the president. Is this why it has been so unceremoniously dropped from the roster of vowelitude? I consider this a conspiracy of epic proportions.

While researching this column I tried contacting my sixth grade English teacher. Surely she would give credence to my recollections. Mysteriously, my message was never returned. Even my most trusted mentors are part of the silence. Where did we stray? Why was no one watching? Where was the General Assembly when the powers-that-be decided to chuck 'w' down the memory hole?

Even the entertainment industry has been instrumental in keeping us from our extra vowels. Notice that no one ever picked 'w' when time came to select a vowel on " Wheel Of Fortune." It was always treated as a lousy consonant. Thus an entire generation of Americans lost part of their hard-won phonetic heritage.

I was able to find two modern English texts that sheepishly listed 'w' as a 'semi-vowel.' That's a little closer, I suppose. But the letter 'y' acting in similar capacity is also considered a semi-vowel. Why the discrimination?

With a preceding 'o' the letter 'w' forms a diphthong, as in the word 'how.' It may look like a consonant but it doesn't act like one. That's the easiest way of explaining away some of the confusion. But where is a word that uses only 'w' as a vowel?

I theorized that at least one word in a standard dictionary would have a 'w' as the vowel. For days I searched through the dictionary looking for this elusive word.

I thought of words like the town name of Bryn Mawr but that didn't quite set well with my sense of linguistic justice. Someone told me that there are many Welsh words that wantonly make merry with our 23rd letter but I wanted actual American words.

Eventually persistence won out and I am pleased to report a word in the English language using the letter 'w' as a vowel. Here it is, straight from the American Heritage Dictionary - Second College Edition:

cwm

You pronounce it like 'koom.' You don't find this word often in crossword puzzles. Even my spell check program kicked this rascal out.

The definition of cwm? A steep hollow occurring at the upper end of a mountain valley. How about that? I gotta cwm right below my house. In fact, Dugspur is cwm central. If you're ever in the neighborhood, cwm on down and see for yourself.