"unsuck"

Thu Apr 21 13:34:10 UTC 2011

I've said some of this before, but it was years ago.

We can never know, definitively or otherwise, what was going through the
mind of the first, utterly unknown, person to utter the words "It sucks."

So far as anyone can tell, however, during the 1960s and 1970s the phrase
was used solely in vulgar contexts, i.e., by predominantly male speakers who
didn't mind saying "fuck" and "shit" in the same sort of conversations.
Does the experience of anyone here contradict that statement?  How many
believed the phrase was nonsexual when they first heard it?  Very few, I
would guess, unless they were sexually unsophisticated at the time.

The linguistic and sexual ethos of the 1960s also added to a subjective
feeling of certainty that no matter what the speaker might have been
thinking in theory, the the "suck" alluded to was effectively sexual.
Mainstream American culture regarded (or pretended to regard) oral sexuality
of any kind as  "unnatural" and "revolting." Indeed it was a criminal
offense in many or most states.

Nonsexual meanings of "suck" could not claim that kind of resonance and so
would have been unlikely to leap to anyone's mind. A person who "sucked" was
generally regarded as unnatural and revolting in ways that may now
seem incredible in the context of today's popular and sexual culture. Except
in sub rosa pornography, oral sex was never alluded to in popular media.
_Oedipus Rex_ was about the only public mention of incest permissible
outside of clinical studies, and discussion of oral sex was more taboo than
that.  I can remember at least one frequently-aired TV commercial of recent
years that, in 1963, would have gotten everyone involved thrown in jail,
with few to defend their sense of humor.

And as we know, high-school men's room graffiti of the period frequently
asserted that So-and-So (male or female) "sucks."  If not quite a cliche, "X
sucks" was a familiar scrawled statement. That fact alone could have set the
metaphor going in many minds at many separate locations.

As Ben observes also, metaphorical examples with non-sexual objects
("wind/rope/eggs/titty/soup" etc.) are nearly nonexistent. (The only
exception might be "suck gas," which appears to be a deliberate pun on the
fairly common "suck ass.") If "suck" had had a nonsexual origin, one would
expect these phrases to be extremely common. They are not.  In
contrast, many sexual or scatological objects are added to make the phrase
even more forceful, further supporting the notion that "sucks" is
overwhelmingly associated with linguistci and social taboos.

My suspicion is that the strong taboo on "suck" began to erode, speaker by
speaker, when children began to pick the phrase from their elders, assuming
that it was just a synonym for the once ubiquitous, impolite but hardly
taboo "stink"  (which is now amazingly uncommon, at least in the media).
Like the elders in question, they soon got into the habit of using it,
despite or because of parental disapproval.

It is hardly gratuitous to observe that James Blake was in prison, a
linguistically coarse environment, when he seems to have recorded
the earliest discovered metaphorical "sucks" in 1963. It seems to be beyond
dispute that the overwhelming majority of speakers between the 1960s and the
1990s (and probably even today) found obvious (not to mention transgressive)
sexual overtones in "It sucks," even if today the overtones are
comparatively muted. That is as close as we can ever get to saying
what "sucks" "really meant."

JL

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "unsuck"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:
> [quoting my Language Log comment]
> >> 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 =97 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.
> >
> > 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?
>
> I don't discount the various non-vulgar transitives as contributing
> factors to the "X sucks" formation. I also don't discount the
> non-vulgar intransitive "stink" as a significant forerunner. I do,
> however, take issue with the idea that the sexual reading of “X sucks”
> was a construal overlaid after the fact by parents and others anxious
> about possible vulgarity. Thanks to the Vietnam Graffiti Project, we
> now have sufficient evidence that even in the mid- to late '60s,
> intransitive "suck" and transitive "suck dick (etc.)" were equally
> available as pejoratives, applied to both human and non-human
> subjects.
>
> For the paper I presented at last year's ICHLL conference in Oxford
> ("Graffiti Scrawls and Hip-Hop Calls: Coming to Grips with
> Non-Traditional Sources for Historical Lexicography"), I surveyed all
> 159 examples of "suck" in the VGP corpus. "Suck" takes a vulgar object
> in 44 cases (usually some variation on "dick/cock," but also "ass" and
> "shit" -- needless to say, no "wind/rope/eggs" in the mix). Vulgar
> objects most often occur with human subjects, but there are a number
> of non-human exx: subjects as diverse as "the Army," "ship travel,"
> and "Cleveland, Ohio" could all be said to “suck dick.” For this early
> group of users, then, no clear dividing line could be drawn between
> vulgar transitivity and non-vulgar intransitivity, since the two forms
> alternated freely with a variety of subjects.
>
> At least that's how I see it.
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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