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onestandingstill -> Word Origin of Domme (1/31/2007 7:19:19 AM)
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Hello All,
I find this very interesting as I had no idea Domme was just a recent catch term for a Dominatrix.
suzanne
"Domme" is a term for dom (dominant) with the "-me" added to specify the female gender. The commonly accepted theory for the term's origin is that it was coined online to quickly differentiate a female dominant from her male brethren.
Some people pronounce it like "dom" and others pronounce it "Dom-may." Despite the French sounding pronounciation, the word has no determinable foreign origin.
In a post to the Yahoo Leather History mailing list, Hypatia Swan, Ph.D. presented her research on the term:
I researched the use of the word "domme" in connection with "the scene" by tracking the usage of the word on usenet. I used "alt.sex.bondage" as a representative newsgroup and tracked the frequency of occurrence of the word "domme" for each year starting in 1989 (As far as I can tell, the group didn't exist until 1989).
I used tracking for the word "rope" as a baseline to get an idea of general trends in usenet usage (a sort of normalization factor).
All tracking was conducted using google search function (formerly dejanews.com). I searched by year, exclusively in the newsgroup mentioned. Feel free to repeat and/or verify/correct this search. It's kind of fun to diddle with.
Important points:
I found that the word "domme" first appeared on alt.sex.bondage in 1990 - a single hit (perhaps a misspelling?).
"Domme" didn't appear until 1993 after that, and there were 35 occurrences of the word in that year.
Interestingly, in 1993, people were writing "dom femme" and "fem domme" interchangeably - usually when referring to pro dominants.
After 1993, use of the word "domme" grew quickly on this usenet group.
....
All of this leads me to believe that use of the word "domme" didn't really catch on until about 1993-1994... the same time that "that thar inner net [sic]" was catching on (who knew?).
In addition, I think it might be entirely possible that the word domme came into existence because some people interchanged the words "femme dom" with "fem domme." A misspelling-spelling of sorts. It may have caught on after that since the misspelled-spelled word may have filled the perceived niche of having gender specificity. Any thoughts on this? Anyone hear the term in real life prior to 1993? Just my theory.
Dr. Swan found that the peak frequency for the word Domme occurred in about 1996 at about ~550 or so hits. Then as usenet usage declined, the number of hits for "domme" and "rope" declined similarly.
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