eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Magna cum laude will continue to get puerile snickers for a long time to come.

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 15, 2011, at 12:17 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Unless my sources have misled me seriously, English "cum" didn't
> become iconic till the 1980s.
>
> "Kum" is far newer - and better because it allows for the continued teaching
> of Latin in our schools without constant distraction. And discipline.
>
> JL
>
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: eye dialect was RE: nekkid
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 2:38 PM +0000 3/15/11, Charles C Doyle wrote:
>>> 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 is also the homonymy avoidance motivation at work.  Do we know
>> if "cum" began as a noun or a verb? Neither is in Farmer & Henley,
>> and I don't have JL's cumpendium on me at the moment and the OED just
>> has the Latin preposition.  The orthographic distinction does appear
>> to be here to stay--I'm surprised no one has registered .cum as a
>> domain suffix for porn sites.
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> And then, from the other side of the ideological continuum, there is
>> (or at least was) "Amerika".  Not to mention "AmeriKKKa".
>>
>> LH
>>
>>> ________________________________________
>>> 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".
>>>
>>> _____________________________________________________________
>>> Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.
>>>
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>>>
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>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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