"unsuck"

[Ronald Butters]

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? 




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Ben Zimmer said,

April 19, 2011 @ 11:04 pm

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 — 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.


On Apr 20, 2011, at 11:57 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:

> On Language Log, I have a post about the word "unsuck," as used by the
> website Unsuck It <http://unsuck-it.com/> (which translates corporate jargon
> into plain English):
> 
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3099
> 
> Both the "un-" and "suck" components are of interest, but the commenters
> mostly want to talk about the history of pejorative "suck" (which we've
> discussed many, many times).
> 
> --bgz
> 
> 
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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