[SPAM:##] Re: "come face"

[Wilson Gray]

When I first heard this use of "come" WRT sex as a child down in
Texas, ca.1948, I thought that the word was "caum," as some people
pronounce "calm," with "caumed" as the past. Unfortunately, as a
consequence of having lived for some years in Saint Louis, I had lost
my native command of the local Texas dialect. So, I thought that there
were two words: "come" and "caum," when, in fact, there was only one
word: "caum."

When I heard "caum" used in its standard meaning, my internal grammar
automatically rewrote that as "come," so that I "heard" it as "come."
But, when I heard "caum" used in the sense of "come to climax," my
internal grammar mistakenly registered it as a new lexical item with
different phonetics, so that I heard what was said as it was actually
pronounced: "caum."

I believed this misinterpretation of "come" v. "caum" for decades, to
such an extent that, in the '70's, I once tried to write a linguistics
paper to the effect that the shift in the meaning of "come" had
motivated a shift in the phonetics of the word. Of course, the real
change was only the regularization of the past to "caumed" from
"came."

-Wilson


On 10/18/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      [SPAM:##] Re: "come face"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Oct 18, 2006, at 10:49 AM, Charlie Doyle wrote:
>
> > "Cum face" is easier to search; it's the same, isn't it?
>
> well, no; this is 'face with cum on it'.  but you knew that.
>
> > It's interesting how "come" and "cum" got differentiated purely by
> > spelling.
>
> for lots of people (of whom i am one).  this gives you a verb with
> the past form "came" (which is what i say), and a noun that clearly
> looks like a noun, and (since it it has a non-standard spelling, an
> ear spelling) looks "dirtier" than the noun "come".
>
> meanwhile, from the noun "cum" there's a (zero-)derived verb "cum"
> 'ejaculate on, shoot cum on', apparently seen mostly in the past
> participle: someone gets their face/ass/boobs/whatever cummed.
>
> but the v-"come"/n-"cum" pattern isn't the only one around.  some
> people have "cum" for both, giving a past form "cummed", as in
>
> The other day i cummed for the first time. My male friends told me
> that i should have only cummed a droplet, but i cummed and it ran all
> down my penis. ...
> www.malehealth.co.uk/userpage1.cfm?item_id=374
>
> and some people have "come" for both.  no doubt there are people with
> variation for one or both of these items, with the spellings
> belonging to different stylistic levels (with "come" as a bit more
> refined than "cum").  someone should investigate this.
>
> for all i know, there are people who have "cum" only as the verb and
> "come" only as the noun, though that looks bizarre to me.
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>
>
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Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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