WIRED: Here's why people can't stop calling Jeremy Hunt the C-word

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According to Patrycja Strycharczuk, a lecturer in linguistics at Manchester University, “c**t” is not a natural mispronunciation for “Hunt”.

The consonants 'c' and 'h' are not phonetically similar. “[The hard 'c' sound, or 'k'] is a lingual consonant, meaning it's made by moving the tongue, whereas ['h'] is glottal, and its production involves a specific position of the vocal folds – their production involves different parts of the vocal tract anatomy”, say Strycharczuk. “Try to think about it in the context of different pairs of words: how likely are you to mispronounce 'hot' as 'cot', or 'hit' as 'kit'? Neither of these seems likely, which suggests it cannot simply be about sound similarity.”

There has to be something priming the substitution, she explains: “it might be anticipating another k-word or previous exposure to this mispronunciation, and its salience: it's rude and therefore memorable.”