I'm updating the Hired Goons business plan, in preparation for a government program I'll be applying for this week, and I've come to the "Future Products and Services" section. I started to write about a feature we'll be introducing to the website to make it more interactive for users, and to give people a reason to regularly visit the site — besides this extremely informative publisher's journal — that integrates several applications' APIs to make it do everything we want it to do. I started to describe it as a [noun]-cum-[noun] (I'll discuss it in more detail when it's at least in beta) but paused because, though I'm using "cum" in the proper sense, meaning "combined with", word choice also depends on the popular understanding of a word, and I wouldn't want an adjudicator to think one of squidandink.com's features involves an application orgasming onto another one — considering I'm talking about a webpage feature, that is a reasonable risk.

So I checked etymonline.com for arguments for or against using it. The first entry explains the word to be "a modern variant of the sexual sense of 'come'" and goes on about "'loose songs' collected by Bishop Percy". But at the bottom it explains that in Latin it's a preposition that means "with", such as in the example: "slumber party-cum-bloodbath".

Yes! That's the sort of imagery I want to evoke with this business plan. Cheers to you, Douglas Harper, for that excellent entry.

This should do as a make-up for last week's missed entry. Next week will feature the third installment of Starting Your Own Start-up: Government finances company that's developing API-on-API orgasms.