eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 1:01 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The verb certainly antedates the noun. See HDAS. The, um, underlying idea
> appears to be to "arrive to one's purpose," OED 4a and related defs. (Cf.
> also, ahistorically, def. 16.)
>


Wasn't the phrase,

"come to climax"

once - ca. sixty or more years ago? - a fairly common one in the
better kind of um-writing, e.g. tomes purportedly on the "psychology
of sex," but actually about fucking?

_Cum(med)_ is standard on um-sites.

In Marshall, back in the '40's, the spelling, _caum(med)_ was used.
Since my command of the local dialect had, by the time that I was
getting hip to sex-talk, been corrupted by years of living in Saint
Louis, it was a half-century later before I suddenly flashed on the
fact that that spelling, like unto _cum_, was merely "come" written as
ordinarily pronounced in Southern, non-boojie BE: approx. [kOm], i.e.
something like the [a] in the L-less pronunciation of "calm," but
rounder.

The psychology of speech is a continuing source of wonder. When I
heard the home-boys use "caum" in an environment in which I expected
to hear "come," then "come" was what I heard. OTOH, when I heard
"caum" used in the sense of "of a male, come to climax, ejaculate
(semen)," then I heard the actual phonetics of the local
pronunciation, especially given that "caummed" was used as the Past.

The fact that, in Saint Louis and elsewhere, the ordinary forms,
"come, came" were used by all and sundry for both senses, the
connection between "come" and "caum" escaped my notice until after I
had become aware of the shift to "come, comed"/"cum, cummed." I spent
dekkids thinking that "caum" was a whole 'nother lexical item.

I've never had any difficulty hearing the BE pronunciation of "love"
as [lOv] and, IMO, [Ov] is the only correct citation-pronciation of
_of._. [^v]?!!! Surely, you jest!

The first time that I became aware of the ordinariness of that usage
among a certain class of misguided speakers was in Phonetics 101 at
Davis, when a classmate used [^v] in isolation and I found that I was
the only person in the class who noticed that a flying saucer had just
landed outside the classroom window.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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