"unsuck"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:
[quoting my Language Log comment]
>> In a 2001 article in the journal Dictionaries (PDF available here), Ron
>> Butters argued that intransitive suck owes its origin to non-vulgar
>> transitive uses like "suck wind/rope/eggs." He sees the fellatio reading
>> as a later development. But as I noted above, the evidence we now have
>> from Vietnam-era graffiti shows that the sexual construal was prominent
>> even in the mid- to late '60s =97 the fact that young draftees were
>> scribbling both "The Army sucks" and "The Army sucks dick" (and
>> variations thereof) undercuts the idea that the vulgarity was a
>> post-facto reinterpretation.
>
> Well, Ben, granted that people in Viet Nam wrote both "The Army sucks"
> and "The army sucks dick." But LONG before that, people were already
> saying, "The N sucks wind/rope/eggs." Isn't the usual rule of thumb that
> the earliest form is the original one? So why do you give priority to
> your dick?

I don't discount the various non-vulgar transitives as contributing
factors to the "X sucks" formation. I also don't discount the
non-vulgar intransitive "stink" as a significant forerunner. I do,
however, take issue with the idea that the sexual reading of “X sucks”
was a construal overlaid after the fact by parents and others anxious
about possible vulgarity. Thanks to the Vietnam Graffiti Project, we
now have sufficient evidence that even in the mid- to late '60s,
intransitive "suck" and transitive "suck dick (etc.)" were equally
available as pejoratives, applied to both human and non-human
subjects.

For the paper I presented at last year's ICHLL conference in Oxford
("Graffiti Scrawls and Hip-Hop Calls: Coming to Grips with
Non-Traditional Sources for Historical Lexicography"), I surveyed all
159 examples of "suck" in the VGP corpus. "Suck" takes a vulgar object
in 44 cases (usually some variation on "dick/cock," but also "ass" and
"shit" -- needless to say, no "wind/rope/eggs" in the mix). Vulgar
objects most often occur with human subjects, but there are a number
of non-human exx: subjects as diverse as "the Army," "ship travel,"
and "Cleveland, Ohio" could all be said to “suck dick.” For this early
group of users, then, no clear dividing line could be drawn between
vulgar transitivity and non-vulgar intransitivity, since the two forms
alternated freely with a variety of subjects.

At least that's how I see it.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org