Stupid Question ™
By John Ruch
© 2003
Q: Is “cum” the noun
and “come” the verb?
—Sean Scheiderer,
A: If there’s one thing I truly appreciate, it’s an attempt to use vulgarity correctly. William Safire would be proud.
And this is one of our great vulgarities—a four-letter word that has recently been chopped down to three letters and become all the dirtier for it.
“Come” is both a noun and a verb, referring variously to orgasm; to the semen produced by the male orgasm; or even to vaginal fluids produced by sexual intercourse (an idiosyncratic usage derived from the semen meaning).
“Cum” is merely an alternative spelling of “come,” and these days it, too, can refer to either the noun or verb usage.
However, the noun meaning (“semen”) was the origin of the “cum” spelling and is still its primary usage.
The sexual meaning of the common word “come” began with the verb form (“to orgasm”) as early as 1600. The earliest usages of “come” refer to both the male and female orgasms, but it appears that the male ejaculate was the origin of the usage.
That’s because the usage appears to be derived from the phrase “come forth with,” meaning to bring something out either figuratively or literally. A similar but non-sexual phrase in the 1600s was “[to] come it,” meaning to accomplish something. Another similar meaning was the 1800s criminal slang phrase, “Come it,” meaning, “Tell it” or, “Confess.”
The great slang student Eric Partridge claimed that “come” was originally intended as a euphemism, but the earliest surviving examples are all quite graphic—indeed, pornographic.
Surprisingly, the noun form of “come,” referring to semen, only showed up very recently, around 1920. Verbs, especially sexual ones, typically take on noun meanings much more quickly than that. I find the lag time hard to believe and I presume there were idiosyncratic noun uses over the centuries until it somehow entered the public consciousness in the early part of the 1900s.
The “cum” spelling variant, which sprang from the use of the noun form of “come,” looks to be even more recent. The earliest citation I could find is from the 1940s, and may simply have reflected illiteracy. “Cum” entered common parlance in the 1960s via gay slang, which certainly codified the “semen” meaning (as opposed to the rare “vaginal fluids” meaning).
It is presumed that the “cum” (mis)spelling is intended to look crude, thus emphasizing the sexual or vulgar meaning. This is useful because “come” is such a common word with many different meanings, and also a rather gentle-looking one.
It should be noted that in the pre-dictionary age, “cum” was a common alternative phonetic spelling of “come” in all uses well into the 1600s, but that does not appear to have had any effect on the modern sexual term. English pronunciation hasn’t changed drastically since then, so the coincidence is not remarkable.
Likewise,
collegiate punning aside, there’s no relation to Latin cum (“with”).