SUX

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:28 PM -0400 9/27/04, Geoff Nathan wrote:
>Something that has been bothering me about this discussion (and
>nobody, unless I've missed it has mentioned it) is that the word
>'sucker' seems much older, and, according to the OED, derives from a
>very old sense (c 1400) meaning being not yet weaned, and thus
>newcomer, greenhorn, and, by the usual semantic extensions,
>'simpleton'.  Certainly, 'There's a sucker born every minute' is
>nineteenth century--I found a website yesterday tracing its origin
>to one of P T Barnum's competitors, incidentally.  And until this
>debate started I had never connected 'sucker' (as in gullible fool,
>etc.) with the somewhat different meaning of 'be bad'.
>Interestingly, the connotation the word now seems to have ('that
>movie sucks') seems to be merely 'bad', not necessarily 'disgusting,
>revolting' etc.  Admittedly, that's based on my (perhaps less than
>reliable) intuitions of its meaning.
>

I think the last shift you mention, the "merely 'bad'" sense of "That
movie sucks", is just the effect of ordinary semantic
weakening/bleaching of the kind we have in positive emphatics like
"awesome" and negative ones like "awfully" or "terrible", not a
reinvention of the sucker-born-every-minute sense.

Larry