On Jun 8, 2011, at 6:36 AM, Catherine Arnott Smith wrote: > Re: "come" in the sense of orgasm: One of my research areas is the use of > obscenity to describe health concepts, so I happen to have encountered this > question before. The OED Third dates this usage to "before 1650" and > Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English to 1600.
I'm surprised by this, obviously, and I don't have an OED 3 or Partridge handy and won't get a chance to look at either any time soon. What examples do they give? I went electronically searching texts of Restoration comedies (noted for their loose view of sexual mores) for "come" and "die," and had no trouble turning up sexual meanings for "die" and no luck finding any for "come." For example, Wycherley's 1675 play The Country Wife, surely the crassest piece of sexploitation in the Restoration canon, "come" shows up more than a hundred times, with no sexual connotation that I can detect, while die appears only in this line, its sexual meaning obvious: And now, Madam, let me tell you plainly, no body else shall marry you by Heavens, I'll die first, for I'm sure I shou'd die after it. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
