eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Charles C Doyle]

Similarly with the proud University of Georgia "Dawgs" ('bulldogs').

Not just "kum" but "cum" for 'male ejaculate' must have originated as eye-dialect--and "cum" has become almost the accepted "scientific" term!

There's a folk belief (at least) that in the South "misspellings" with "K" used to signal commercial concerns that were sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan (n.b. the spelling "Klan").  E.g. "Krispy Kreme."  I doubt if that's true any longer.

--Charlie


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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of James A. Landau <JJJRLandau at netscape.com> [JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:02 AM


The sports section of the Philadelphia Inquirer is fond of referring to the Philadelphia Eagles football team as the "Iggles".  This is not done to sneer at the literacy of local football fans but rather to give a feeling of "yes, we're local" to the readers.

If you ever see in print male ejaculate referred to as "kum", you can be sure you are reading a low-brow girlie magazine.

Perhaps not really eye dialect, but advertisers sometimes deliberately use phonetic spellings as eye-catchers, e.g. "Ken-l Ration".  "LUV" was used by at least two different firms, one for a brand of disposable diapers and one for an infant's car seat.

Occasionally such a deliberate misspelling will catch on.  Specifically "lite" was originally used (to the best of my recollection) as a come-on for somebody's sugar-free soft drink but has caught on to mean any diet drink, or more generally a diet food, and even by extension something with less than the normal caloric/intellectual/whatever load, e.g. sneering at someone's publication as "American Speech lite".

   - James A. Landau

PS:  I received a "Nigerian" e-mail (actually it was from Russia) soliciting me for a "mutual preposition".

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