suck

[Ronald Butters]

So which is it? Ben takes issue with my DICTIONARIES article for arguing that

"intransitive suck owes it's origin to non-vulgar transitive uses like
'suck/wind/rope/eggs' " and seeing the fellatio reading as a later
development"

Yet he now agrees that

"the various non-vulgar transitives [were] contributing factors to the
'X sucks' formation."

My article does not deny that, when "X sucks" was  written on walls in
the Viet Nam War (or anywhere else), many of the writers may have had a
'fellatio' sense at least partially in mind (and doubtless the written
form derives from oral use [no pun intended]). Ben's data was not
available to me when I wrote my article; it is important and
illuminating (and I'd love to see his unpublished article on the topic).
Even so, the other uses (including the pejorative noun "sucker") were
very much alive at the time. How much they may have contributed to the
new use is impossible to say. It is also not necessarily the case that
"X SUCKS" originated in Viet Nam--that is just where we have Ben's data.

So maybe we more or less agree about etymology.

But Ben seriously misrepresents my article by implying that I maintained
that " the sexual reading of 93X sucks" was SIMPLY a "construal
overlaid after the fact by parents and others anxious about possible
vulgarity." What I have maintained is that

people who are either "anxious about possible vulgarity" or delighted
with the thought of a "possible vulgarity" mentally completely block the
potential lexicosemantic connection between (a) all the other relatively
innocent slang expressions that involve SUCK and (b) the phrase "X
SUCKS"--so as to interpret it as (c) necessarily a metaphorical
extension only of 'fellatio' and (d) necessarily etymologically derived
exclusively from "X SUCKS {word meaning penis}."

This is a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fact that I find even
more interesting than what people might have meant when they first
uttered pejorative "X SUCKS." Surely there were people who wrote "X
SUCKS" thinking of it as a shortening of "X SUCKS {word meaning penis}."
Surely there were people who heard other people say "X SUCKS" and
thought they were hearing a shortening of "X SUCKS wind/rope/eggs/hind
tit." Surely there were other people  heard "X SUCKS" for the first time
and thought of it as related to "a sucker is born every minute" or
"don't be a sucker" or "sucker punch." As I think I wrote in my article,
the first time I saw  "X SUCKS" (the exact form was 'the world sucks') I
thought of vacuum cleaners. And obviously there are MANY other people
who thought "X SUCKS" must mean only "X SUCKS {word meaning penis}." But
why, given that SUCK is lodged elsewhere in their brains as SUCKER (both
of penises and of some vague non-penile X), do they attach the "vulgar"
reading to "X SUCKS" but not to "SUCKER PUNCH"?

In short, Ben and I agree that the etymology of pejorative "X SUCKS" has
to be considered as complex, and that the the pejorative "X SUCKS" is
the last one to arrive. I also would agree with him that the sexual
reading of 93X sucks" is not simply a "construal overlaid after the
fact by parents and others anxious about possible vulgarity," but I
disagree with him to the extent that he seems to be saying that "X SUCKS
{word meaning penis}" has been the only plausible reading of pejorative
"X SUCKS" until recent amelioration through the deadening process of
continued use (and perhaps also with the added factor that fellatio has
increased in social acceptance). After what "fact"? That seems to entail
accepting as "fact" that "X SUCKS" could not have meant "X SUCKS {word
meaning penis}" to anyone, which is of course as ridiculous as the
putative "fact" that "X SUCKS" could ONLY have meant "X SUCKS {word
meaning penis}" or the putative "fact" that "X SUCKS" could ONLY have
originated as a simple shortening of  "X SUCKS {word meaning penis}."

By the way, I  strongly suspect that people in the 1920s used insults
such as "You suck cocks!"--they just didn't write it. (Has anybody
checked Allen Walker Read's 1935 book to see what evidence is there?
Unfortunately, Google Books has only snippet view and I can't find my
own copy.)

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