"sucks" revisited

[Wilson Gray]

My questions are these:

1) Why does no one, apparently, find "Hummer," connoting, as it does,
a particular method of fellatio, the "Hawaiian hum-job" of the
mid-Twentieth Century United States, offensive?

2) Why are we black Americans continually forced to beg for respect,
even when it comes to the origin and use of our own dialect?

The latter question refs the article on "baby-daddy / baby-mama"
linked to the article on "sucks." How anyone could assign a foreign
origin to a phrase that Ockhams' Razor and Labov's research clearly
defines as native to the United States is beyond my comprehension. But
what really bugs my head is WHY anyone would even want to bother to
make this kind of pseudo-scholarly bullshit up.

Every time that I read or hear the claim that racism no longer exists
in this country, it makes me want to "blow chunk," to borrow a phrase
which clearly has its origins in the Old Friesian "tsungken te
blaewen," roughly "to hurl (vomitus from one's buccal cavity)" or "to
barf."

-Wilson


On 8/6/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "sucks" revisited
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Without the aid of Ron Butters' scholarship, but reaching essentially
> the same conclusions:
>
> Seth Stevenson's defense of "sucks", at
> http://slate.com/id/2146866
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be
imposed upon them.

Frederick Douglass

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