eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:26 AM -0500 3/15/11, Laurence Horn wrote:
>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.

P.S. (prompted by a message from Leslie Decker):

While I'm sure 'come', even in the sexual sense, originated as a
verb, what I was wondering was whether the 'cum' spelling was partly
motivated as much by the fact that it was functioning (in its first
cumming) as a noun as by its specialized meaning.  Note too that as a
verb, "cum" now sports its own regularized past tense, "cummed",
which may or may not betray a denominal origin (cf. "ringed" vs.
"rang", although in that case the two verbs are mere homonyms). While
"comed" exists, it's far rarer.

LH

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