USA Today on "sucks "

[Jonathan Lighter]

I second.

I mean, "the motion," of course.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: USA Today on "sucks "
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At 1:26 PM -0400 9/30/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 13:10:58 -0400, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>>It could be (I'd say should be) argued that there's a generally
>>tendency for these non-episodic intransitives to be understood
>>euphemistically, i.e. with an unarticulated object one would just as
>>soon not specify explicitly:
>>
>>X sucks/blows
>>Y swallows
>>W drinks [sc. '...alcohol']
>>W smells [sc. '...bad']
>>
>>(The last isn't agentive, to be sure, but the 'smells bad' sense
>>represents a similar development.)
>>Others?
>
>There's also "X bites". HDAS has:
>
> to be exceptionally hateful, disappointing, unfair, etc.; SUCK. --
> also constr. with _it_, or followed by various phrases sugg. fellatio
> (for which see _bite the big one_, below) or coprophila.
>
Right, "bite(s)". I nominate "the euphemistic absolute" for this
constructional pattern.

L


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