Surprisingly, the word of the day is cum

(See, for instance, discussion on Shay's blog.)

I've always come down on the "come" side of the debate. I've never been impressed with it because I remember it first showed up in the same hippie-dippie era as words like "luv" and re-spelling names that end in "y" to end in "i," and that little thing where people dotted their i's and j's with circles. And so for me it's always smacked of a kind of adolescent deprecation of something that people were sort of embarrassed to talk about.

There's also the problem of tenses: Sure, "Whatever you do don't stop licking just... exactly... like that... I'm ...about to ...'cum'" works, at least in the sense that that's how you might spell the word your partner actually says. But that leaves the writer in a bind when expressing how one tells one's partner afterwards that "I got so excited when you said you were about to 'cum' that I ____ too." A survey of modern American and English usage says that about 99.8% of actual English speakers would use the word "came." But if the present tense is to be spelled "cum" then how is one to spell the past tense? (Note: diehards evidently depart from English and write "cummed" although I've yet to meet a live human who's used that word out loud.)

So!

After all that preamble you might expect me to dismiss the word "cum" like a lame, low-rent, suburban porn shop, phthalates-contaminated jelly dildo. And indeed I wish I could.

...if not for this entry from TheFreeDictionary.com

cum 1
prep.
Together with; plus. Often used in combination: our attic-cum-studio.
[Latin; see kom in Indo-European roots.]

Hmm. "Together with?" Nice. "Plus?" Great!

And when you do go looking for the Indo-European root kom you get the American Heritage Dictionary's definition found at, for instance, Bartleby.com we learn

ENTRY: kom
DEFINITION: Beside, near, by, with.
Derivatives include enough, handiwork, and country.
1. enough, gemot, handiwork, witanagemot, yclept, yean, from Old English ge-, with, also participial, collective, and intensive prefix, from Germanic *ga-, together, with (collective and intensive prefix and marker of the past participle). 2. cum1; cooncan, from Latin cum, co-, with. 3. co-, com-, from Archaic Latin com, with (collective and intensive prefix). 4. British Celtic *kom-, collective prefix, in compound *kombrogos (see merg-). 5. Suffixed form *kom-tr-. con1, contra-, contrary, counter1, counter-, country; encounter, from Latin contr, against, opposite. 6. Suffixed form *kom-yo-. coeno-; cenobite, epicene, Koine, from Greek koinos, common, shared. 7. Reduced form *ko- in compounds (see gher-1, mei-1, smei-). (Pokorny kom 612.)

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

and then if that's a bit far afield the Collens Dictionary brings it back home very nicely.

cum prep. used between two objects to designate an object of a combined nature

In other words, whereas it's unlikely that the 60's-era teenie-boppers who wrote "Bobbi luvs Terri" on their Nifty brand binders with electric-blue ballpoint pens, or the underground comic artists who wrote "Doobie cums in Red" the word "cum" isn't the worst possible word!

In it's Latin, and earlier Indo-European forms "cum" puts people together, as in "companion" or (for the polyamorists among us) "community." "Come," on the other hand merely indicates that one has arrived. But arrived from... where exactly?

At any rate, 99.8% of the time I'm still going to prefer the English rather than the Latin spelling but (channelling goofy 'winger language guy James Kilpatrick) the word cum, properly italicized of course, is an appropriate designation for orgasms one has *with* one's partner.

So the word of the day, much to my surprise and possibly even to my chagrin, is cum. Mmm, cum. Not bad! Let's all come together on that.