COME, v., n., also cum. Here we go. “Come” is an “elementary intransitive verb of motion,” per the Oxford English Dictionary, usually indicating movement toward instead of movement away (as in “go”), but you know we are not here to talk about that. The usage of interest is the OED’s definition II.iv.22, “to experience sexual orgasm.”
It’s older than you might think: the OED dates its first textual appearance to Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s 1604 comedy The Honest Whore (“If ever I stand in neede of a wench that will come with a wet finger, Porter, thou shalt earne my mony”) but there’s a note that earlier appearances in print have been excluded because they’re mere innuendo and thus ambiguous.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, more at ease with dirty jokes, identifies one such earlier appearance. It’s Shakespeare, from Much Ado About Nothing (1599):
MARGARET Well, I will call Beatrice to you, who I
think hath legs.
BENEDICK And therefore will come.
Green’s Dictionary prints that line as a question (And therefore will come?), but I’m using the Folger Shakespeare Library. I think the other uses of “come” in the scene are arguably even more imbued with innuendo, like this bit that happens right before the passage above:
MARGARET Will you then write me a sonnet in praise
of my beauty?
BENEDICK In so high a style, Margaret, that no man
living shall come over it, for in most comely truth
thou deservest it.
MARGARET To have no man come over me? Why, shall I
always keep below stairs?
By the way, I watched Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 Much Ado About Nothing hoping to find out how the actors played this (it’s the opening of Act V, scene 2), but it’s not in the film! They cut straight from Hero’s fake funeral to Benedick trying to write a sonnet. Tragic. My perusal of Youtube search results for this scene makes it seem like something that frequently gets cut from the play, but here’s a version where the actor playing Margaret leans into it.
Anyway, the journey from “elementary intransitive verb of motion” to “achieve orgasm” is probably straightforward. Green’s Dictionary says it’s a shortening of “come to a climax,” though there is a possible connection with “come,” OED definition II.iv.21, “Of butter: to be formed in the process of churning milk or cream” (1577) and also with the contemporaneous slang use of “butter” to mean semen. Apparently people used to say “to make butter with one’s tail” to mean a woman having sex? I guess that means the vagina is the churn? Writing this newsletter teaches me so much. (I gotta link the last time the word “butter” was in this newsletter, which was also a wild ride.)
The noun is much newer than the verb. Charmingly, the OED cites a 1923 French-English slang dictionary entry that just says “Come, sperme” and a 2011 romance novel. (Midnight Sins by Lora Leigh—do you think she knows she’s in the OED? I also want to know the story of the Oxford lexicographer who chose this particular instance of “come.”)
And at last we arrive at the alternate spelling, “cum.” As a noun and a verb, “cum” dates from the 1960s and the first instances for both are US English; looking at the citations in Green’s, Australians were also early adopters. The spelling “enhances the sexual aspect of the otherwise common word,” according to Green’s.
The come-cum debate gets heated among romance writers; people will argue that the former is a verb and the latter a noun only, or that “cum” is unacceptable in either case, or that “come” isn’t sexy. I am not here to tell you that your preference is right or wrong, just that it is a preference. Language has no high priest or empress to issue decrees, no cops to enforce them, and even if it did, sexual slang still wouldn’t obey. Surely we can all come together over that.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
The Marquis Who Mustn’t (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Courtney Milan. Please don’t mistake me saying “the pottery in this romance is so cool” to mean that the romance itself isn’t swoony and heartfelt, or that the little fictional community of Wedgeford, primarily composed of Asian immigrants and their British children, with its annual festival/competition called the Trials, isn’t one of genre romance’s most charming small towns. It is swoony. Wedgeford is indeed darling. But listen: the pottery in this romance is so cool. You can tell a lot of care went into researching and writing it, and Courtney Milan’s historical note at the end of the novel is such a pleasure to read. As always, I love a con artist with a secret heart of gold, and pairing said con artist with an honest, determined, practical woman is the most fun you can have. Naomi, the practical woman in question, also has a really beautifully written arc of realizing that she’s misunderstood her mother. Love and strength look different for different people. Naomi’s family issues are more subtle than Kai’s (his dad is a con artist without a heart of gold), and the book delves into the ways that good, kind people can still do wrong by each other—and also the ways they can make things right.
The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy) by Megan Bannen. This book is hard to describe—sort of a fantasy Western with early 20th-century tech, set on a fictional archipelago with demigods and zombies, but also You’ve Got Mail, and sincere and whimsical except when it gets serious about death and grief—and hard to review because I feel like everyone I know has already read it. That can’t be true, though, so here’s an attempt. Hart, lonely zombie-fighting marshal, sometimes has to bring unidentified bodies to a funeral parlor run by Mercy, lonely and underappreciated daughter trying to save her failing family business. Hart and Mercy got off on the wrong foot and have hated each other ever since. When Hart pours his heart out in a letter and addresses it to “A Friend,” this world’s magic mail carriers—one of whom is a prim, dapper owl and the other a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking rabbit—deliver it to Mercy. Thus begins an anonymous correspondence. Hart and Mercy don’t know they’re writing to each other, but they begin to fall in love. A lot of other stuff happens—Hart’s charming apprentice and Mercy’s little brother become boyfriends, Mercy’s sister has a baby, Hart grieves his dog and his mentor and repairs the friendships he’s broken in his grief, Mercy saves the family business, Hart saves the world—but mostly what mattered to me was that I found the central romance very moving. It’s rare in romance, genre of Please Don’t Ask How Long “Happily Ever After” Lasts, to address mortality. This book does it beautifully, and that’s something to treasure. I was a tiny bit disappointed that the happy ending involved policing—even a kinder, fantasy version of policing—but I can overlook it when the rest of the book is so good.
Tell Me Anything (m/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Skye Kilaen. Isabelle is having a rough time: her boyfriend dumped her by moving out of their expensive apartment while she was away, leaving her to pay the rent alone, and from what she can tell, he threatened to out her to her parents if she breaks the lease. Isabelle is bisexual, but her conservative Texan parents don’t know that, and coming out will permanently damage her relationship with them. She’s also an insomniac who can’t afford the medication that helps her sleep, so she’s thoroughly miserable. I wanted Isabelle to be okay—and for somebody to help her—so badly. I couldn’t stop reading until she was. Luckily Derek, a wonderful, softhearted, would-be rescuer, feels the same way. Reading about Derek wrestling with wanting to step in and save Isabelle—to pay her rent, to buy her groceries, to intervene with her ex—was profoundly relatable. But he doesn’t have her permission, so instead he yearns. When she finally lets him do a few things, like give her a hug or buy her pancakes, it came as such a huge relief. They’re very sweet and even a little bit silly with each other, and they both try hard to repress what they think are inappropriately sexy feelings, all of which is an outstanding contrast to the backdrop of serious issues.
There’s a lot of discussion in online spaces dedicated to romance about reading for “comfort,” but what comfort means varies wildly from reader to reader, as Jenny Hamilton discusses in this essay. For me, it’s comforting to see a character who is really, truly struggling find a way to make it through; I like pain and angst in a romance because fiction, especially in a genre with happy endings, can guide a reader through those feelings and out the other side. I like to see a brokenhearted character cry it out and get cuddled. I like to see a lonely character make friends and fall in love. I like to see a character living in fear find their courage. Isabelle figures things out for herself, but she also gets a lot of help from Derek, and from a community of other queer people who take her in when her family shuts her out. Isabelle’s relationship with her parents is especially painful because they’re not otherwise awful to her; they’re just immovably bigoted about this one thing. But every sweet phone call she has with them has an undercurrent of sadness, because she knows they wouldn’t treat her this way if she came out. She loves her parents and it hurts to lose them, but it’s unacceptable to her to stay in the closet for the rest of her life, or to ask Derek, who is older than her and became estranged from his parents over his own bisexuality years ago, to step back into the closet. Sometimes a happy ending means cutting ties with people who demand that you pretend to be someone you’re not and forming new bonds with people who accept you as you are. There’s comfort in that possibility, too, I think.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read the spy thrillers Slow Horses and Dead Lions by Mick Herron, for fun and also because thrillers are great for thinking about how plots work, and these in particular have such incredible use of point of view. Slow Horses is fantastically written and also, having been published in 2010, basically a cuneiform tablet. Characters still carry around digital cameras? Brexit hasn’t happened? A rightwing politician fears that evidence of his Nazi past might damage his career? But more than the gulf between present and recent past, what dropped my jaw was this passage (the character’s name is River, by the way):
Crossing the Thames, River saw a world of tall glass buildings. They were mostly in darkness, towers of un-illuminated windows casting back pinpricks of light they’d found on the streets below or the skies above, but here and there a pane would be starkly lit, and through some there were figures visible, crouched over desks or just standing in rooms, their attention owned by the unknowable. There was always something going on. And it wasn’t always possible, from the outside, to understand what it was.
It’s the darkly clustered houses! It’s the exceedingly complex machine of the world! Less divine, less tragic, more electric, and here, in the quick prose of a spy thriller, more ominous. I’m not tired of it yet and don’t think I ever will be.
Anyway, everyone in these books is kind of awful, and there are some breathtaking moments of awfulness, but the characters are so compelling and I’m already in the library queue for the next one.
I also read the graphic novel Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky, about a transfeminine nonbinary artist getting invited to an old friend’s bachelor party at a floating casino on the Pacific garbage island. All their supposed guy “friends” keep misgendering and insulting them—and also nobody believes them about the murderous cult trying to summon an ancient evil. It’s a delightful and very funny Trans “Final Girl” horror comedy.
I also read “The seats of hope are always reserved,” a short, powerful chapbook by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Some of the poems are printed in Arabic as well as English and the whole thing is online here. And Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet whose work I’ve appreciated before, has a new book out soon, and here is one of his new poems.
It’s my birthday! I’ve never done anything like this, but if you have a little money to spare, I’d love it if you donated to this fundraiser to evacuate a family from Gaza. Together we could make a pretty big dent in it. (The fundraiser is verified by Operation Olive Branch, which has collected many fundraising links in one place. It’s wildly expensive to evacuate because there are exorbitant fees to cross the border into Egypt.)
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on March 17.