Dear husband

In Internet slang, DH is an abbreviation for dear husband; it is commonly used by women on certain forums to refer to their husbands. Similarly, DD means dear daughter and DS means dear son. According to one forum participant interviewed in an ethnographic study, DH first appeared on America Online.^[1]

Hof (2006) writes that DH is not merely shorthand meant to save time, but a "cheeky reference".^[2] Drentea & Moren-Cross (2005) write that using DH and DD help stressed-out women maintain their "good mother" social role by softening complaints about their families. The usage of "dear" can also be sarcastic.^[3] Owens (2007) writes that DH "suggests a certain distancing".^[4]

On one breast cancer forum, where the majority of users are women aged 40–60, a statistical analysis of posts shows that typing out "husband" is associated with short-time members, while "my DD" (rather than "daughter") is associated with long-time members.^[5]

References

1. Hof 2006, p. 369.
2. Hof 2006, p. 368.
3. Drentea & Moren-Cross 2005, p. 929.
4. Owens 2007, p. 183.
5. Nguyen & Rosé 2011, pp. 78,83.

Sources

• Drentea, Patricia; Moren-Cross, Jennifer L. (28 November 2005), "Social capital and social support on the web: the case of an internet mother site", Sociology of Health & Illness 27 (7): 920–943, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2005.00464.x
• Hof, Karina (August 2006), "Something you can actually pick up: Scrapbooking as a form and forum of cultural citizenship" (PDF), European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (3): 363–384, doi:10.1177/1367549406066078, retrieved 28 June 2012
• Nguyen, Dong; Rosé, Carolyn P. (23 June 2011), "Language use as a reflection of socialization in online communities", Proceedings of the Workshop on Language in Social Media (LSM 2011) (PDF), Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 76–85, ISBN 978-1-932432-96-1, retrieved 28 June 2012
• Owens, Kim Hensley (2007), Rhetorical labor: writing, childbirth, and the Internet (Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Further reading

• McGowan, Michelle (2008), "Producing Users of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis: Dominant and Marginalized Discourses in the US Context", in A. Bammé, G. Getzinger & B. Wieser, Yearbook 2007 of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society, pp. 95–110, ISBN 978-3-89019-631-2, retrieved 28 June 2012