eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Laurence Horn]

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".
>
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