Dan Geiser's Journal

The Road by Tenacious D
Sometimes it is very hard to find things on the Internet. And I'm not just talking about not knowing where to go to look. I'm talking about the way things are found on the Internet and what happens when correct or common ways of using words collide with the nature of the Internet. Let me give you an example...

On my weblog I wanted to use the phrase "magician cum actor". I've read the phrase " cum " before and I know that at its simplest meaning it basically means "and". Sometimes it is used derogatively as in "actor cum director", i.e. an actor who has become a director but is not necessarily any good at it. But many times I take it to mean a compliment, pointing out the multi-faceted nature of the person.

So I've read it in print but I've never used it and I want to find out what the proper usage is. Can the word just stand by itself like that "magician cum actor" or should it be hyphenated "magician-cum-actor"? I thought I had seen it used both ways. What I wanted to know was which usage was the more accepted?

The word sounded latin to me. Well, I can't exactly go to a search engine and type 'cum usage' or 'latin cum'. Well, I can...I'm just not going to get the answer I'm looking for. Eventually i settled on the phrase 'english usage cum' which didn't do much. I switched to 'english usage discussion' hoping to find a place where people were discussing the proper usage of the English language and I could just post my question on there.

I typed in my search on Google which brought up a few links related to English language usage discussion. At the top of the page they had a link to the Style Guides portion of the Google Directory. Clicking on that I spotted the online version of Strunk's Elements of Style. Finally we're getting someplace.

I typed in the word hoping to find anything about it in any way. Nothing doing. I went clicked up to the search portion and tried doing a search on all sections of all of the reference sites which were made available through that interface. Bingo! The Columbia Guide to Standard English had something for me...

"cum

is a Latin preposition long adopted by Standard English as a preposition meaning something like ?combined with, together with? or even ?plus?: She served us a sort of brunner?a brunch cum dinner. Its other considerable use in American English is in hyphenated series: His latest book is a novel-cum-sermon that I found quite dull. Pronounce it KUM or KOOM."

Now...I really think that if it wasn't for my persistence and familiarity with how the Internet works I never would have been able to find that. I want someone to explain to me how the Internet is ever going to be able to overcome hurdles like the one I describe above.

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