nom, nomming, nom nom

[Ben Zimmer]

On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> Joseph Salmons wrote:
> > Check out the discussions from last year's Word of the Year at the
> > American Dialect Society meeting, where it was discussed at some l
> > length. I don't know of anything quantitative about its rise, but it's
> > been fast.
>
> Are those discussions recorded? In AS? On-line?
>
> I suppose maybe "yum" + "nosh"?

I covered _nom_ in "Among the New Words" (with Charles Carson) in the latest
edition of American Speech (86:192-214).

http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/vol86/issue2/index.dtl

>From the introduction:

"In the main category [of Word of the Year], _app_ beat out another three-letter
word: _nom_, an onomatopoetic form suggesting pleasurable eating, used as an
interjection, noun or verb. _Nom_ traveled from Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster
(whose voracious noises are often represented as “om nom nom nom”) to the
online images known as “lolcats,” and on to wider usage thanks in part to
Twitter. Despite the seeming novelty of _nom_, it joins a well-established
class of gustatory sound symbolism. The earliest examples catalogued by the
Oxford English Dictionary derive from Caribbean English: _yam_ (1725), _nyam_
(1790), and _ninyam_ (1826). Of more recent vintage are _yum_ (1878), _yummy_
(1899), _num_ (1899), and _nummy_ (1923)."

Citations are provided for _nom_, _nom nom_, _om nom nom_, _nom nom nom_, etc.
The earliest we found is from 2002:

2002 June 30 Siobhan Perricone rec.food.cooking (Usenet newsgroup)
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/msg/a6a350ac3a7492b9   I just
slather on the butter thickly, and they never last long enough to get soggy. OM
NOM NOM!

--bgz


--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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