Linguistics In The Bedroom

Hi there! It's Friday! I love Fridays, don't you? To celebrate, let’s talk for a moment about orgasms! (No, I’m only kidding.) Let’s talk about the way we talk about orgasms! (That time I was serious.)

I’m interested in language anyway and being in a linguistics class right now has really heightened that, plus this topic has always been one of particular interest to me. English, being both the world’s current language of record and eternally broad and flexible, has been studied almost to the point of exhaustion linguistically. But no one spends too much time talking about dirty words, really, and that’s a shame – in some ways they’re the most fun of all. 1

Perhaps they’re unique precisely because they’re so rarely discussed in proper company, because no one quite wants to sit down and say, This is the proper way to use motherfucker and please for the love of all things holy stop spelling it mothafucka.They might have revised Strunk & White with pictures, but they’re never going to revise enough to help anyone who knows the word cunt but doesn’t know it’s not a good idea to use the word in mixed company.

But back to orgasms. I would say this only occurs to me because I’m a writer – what I mean to discuss here is a spelling convention, it’s nothing to do with the way you talk – but then again I’ve never written any kind of erotica or porn that includes an especially explicit reference to an orgasm. I’ve written some sex scenes, but mostly they’re just preludes or general reactions – only in very extreme circumstances can I imagine a serious work of fiction needing to describe the angle and force of each thrust. And if I ever have the need, I think I tend to refer to being “finishing” or “when it was over,” and not the act of orgasm itself. I may have written the “c” word in the previous paragraph, but there’s always a small part of me that’s just a tiny bit prudish.

So maybe it’s something I’ve noticed as a reader. Or maybe it’s a non-issue that only I’m interested in. (Shocking, I know, but it’s happened before.)

My question is: Do people come or do they cum? I’m pretty much exclusively talking about it in terms of verb form here, as I think we’d all agree that the noun with synonyms such as spooge and jizz is cum. But what about the verb? I’ve seen it written both ways (but I’m not actually bored enough to go try to find any right now. Sorry.)

I prefer come, and I can give you rational arguments even though deep down I think it’s just because sentences like Mary was disgusted when John decided to cum on her without asking just kind of look weird to me. Even weirder is the breathless pronouncement I’m gonna cum. Gut instinct is one of the easiest ways to detect something grammatically incorrect, 2 so why not here?

Linguistically, my objection has to do with the fact that it’s a verb whose past tense is came. Logically (not that English conjugation is always logical), you would expect the past tense of cum to be cummed. But it’s not. To me, the verb to come (as it pertains to having an orgasm not what you ask your dog to do) is essentially a verb with an implied but almost never acknowledged prepositional object. To come to orgasm, she came to orgasm, they had come to orgasm, etc. But we just say come, she came, they had come, etc.

The counterpoint would be that in English we very often allow words to function as different parts of speech, so the noun cum might be perfectly capable of becoming the verb cum. In this case, I guess, the verb just happens to conjugate irregularly, maybe because we’re so used to the verb to come that saying cummed would be too strange. Furthermore, you could argue that the idea of to come to orgasm is incorrect since we don’t actually talk about coming to orgasm; we say we had an orgasm. I don’t agree with this argument – and for that matter I’m not sure anyone but me has ever thought about this enough to formulate the argument – but it’s still a valid one.

Does anyone else have thoughts? Preferences?

Next time we’ll try to figure out why the most common way of referring to fellatio involves a verb (to blow) that frankly has no place whatsoever in the act itself. (No, I'm joking, there’s not really going to be a next time.)

1. Consider that in the entire English language we have probably hundreds or thousands of prefixes and affixes but just infix, a linguistic staple of many languages that functions just the same as a prefix or affix except that it appears in the middle of the word. And in English the only infix is the word fuck. As in, absolufuckinglutely.

2. Pretty much everyone can recognize that I are a Steelers fan is incorrect, even if they don’t know enough about subject-verb agreement to explain why.