eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Charles C Doyle]

I don't have my books at hand, but the obviously sexual use of "come" in Elizabethan English tends to mean 'get an erection' (as in "come aloft")--not 'ejaculate'.  Though  one thing leads to another . . . .

As I recall, Shakespeare's sex-obsessed Cleopatra says to the dying (or perhaps now dead) Antony, "Come, come, come."  Alas, Antony neither came back nor came up.

--Charlie

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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Arnold Zwicky [zwicky at STANFORD.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:57 PM


On Mar 15, 2011, at 10:21 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> 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.

some discussion (with a reference to ADS-L) here:

AZ, 12/3/06: Does anybody have a word for this? We do now.:
 http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003853.html

unfortunately, i have no information on the history of the spelling CUM (for the noun or the verb). (OED2 has the noun COME, in the relevant sense, only from 1923.)

arnold

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