Re: Re: SUX

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 9/25/04 5:40:09 PM, wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM writes:


> 
> My impression back then, as well as  now,  was that the word related to oral 
> sex rather than to any of the possible phrases you mention, most of which I 
> never heard in those days.  In that dim period, girls never said it and some 
> became deeply offended when the word (like other taboo vocabulary) was 
> uttered off-handedly in their presence.
> 

I don't think there is any question but what people use more taboo words 
today than in, say, the 1940s, though I understand that you are saying that that 
was the case, just that it was not a "golden age."

I have been fascinated for years with the perception that "X suck(s)" IN ITS 
ORIGIN carried the meaning 'X performs oral sex' (or, more accurately, ' X 
performs fellatio'). Given that "suck" was used for so many years in all of the 
ways that I outlined in my earlier posting, how could the pejorative use the 
the 1960s and beyond NOT be viewed as, in a major way, an extension of the 
already-existing, nearly identical, uses? This is not to say that, say, SUCKER 
PUNCH or DON'T BE A SUCKER--both of which are amply docuemented in the 1950s and 
1960s--could not also brought forth the image of fellatio to the minds of 
people who had one or another kind of interest in fellatio. 

As we all know, slang is rarely something that is invented by one person on a 
particular day in a particular place with a particular neat, tight semantic 
schema in mind. The late Thomas Creswell was pretty convinced that "X suck(s)" 
could ONLY have arisen as a shortening of "X suck(s) cock" (he was 
particularly fond of associating it with "X suck(s) big donkey dicks!" as I reall). This 
has always struck me as rather unscientific in its narrowness, much as I loved 
and admired Tom.

I was amused in my adolescent years by my grandmother's assertion that oral 
sex was invented by the French and introduced into the USA by men who had 
discovered the practice during World War I and had come home insisting upon such 
favors from their wives. While I felt even in those days that I had fairly solid 
empirical evidence that suggested my grandmother was wrong, her perceptions 
do indicate to me that oral sex was such a taboo in the earlier parts of the 
20th century that many people really DIDN'T know about it, and those who did did 
not speak about it very freely. People could say "Bill is such a sucker!" and 
not be perceived as intending any reference to oral sex, and for such people 
"Bill sucks!" would have been equally innocuous. "Bill sucks!" would not have 
to mean 'Bill sucks cocks any more than "Bill is such a sucker!" has to mean 
'Bill is such a cocksucker!' The only difference is that the noun form almost 
certainly predates the verb form, and the verb form seems to have entered the 
language at about the time that people became -- publically, at least -- more 
willing to openly discuss oral sex (and perhaps more preoccupied as well).

In short, it would be silly to believe that "X suck(s)" is UNRELATED to 
'fellatio', but it also seems to me scientifically unsound to maintain that "X 
suck(s)" MEANS or ORIGINALLY MEANT 'X performs fellatio', any more than "Bill is a 
sucker" MEANS or ORIGINALLY MEANT 'Bill performs fellatio'.