eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Mental lapse here. I should have written "cum" not "kum"-- too much time in Germany during my later formative years.

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 15, 2011, at 12:26 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> 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.
>
>> 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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