suck

Thu Apr 21 17:59:20 UTC 2011

My apologies to Ron if I oversimplified the thrust of his
_Dictionaries_ article. I think we're mostly in agreement, but I would
still argue that the fellatio sense played a much larger role in the
development of "X sucks" than Ron is willing to give it. In the
article, Ron argues that there's no reason to privilege vulgar sexual
"suck" as a progenitor of "X sucks" because of a lack of evidence for
forms like "X sucks cock" meaning 'X is bad' from the '60s and '70s.
We now have an abundance of such evidence from the graffiti sources,
which to my mind makes the underlying sexual connotations of "X sucks"
a little more than "putative." I'd be happy to share the data I
collected and analyzed from the Vietnam Graffiti Project with Ron or
anyone else who's interested (and I hope to get it all published some
day).

As for Read's _Lexical Epigraphy_, I also don't have it at hand, but
you can find it cited in OED2 for both transitive and intransitive
uses of sexual "suck", as well as the phrasal verb "suck off":

suck, v. 1. f. trans. With person or part as obj. coarse slang.
1928 in A. W. Read Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy Western N.
Amer. (1935) 78, I suck cocks for fun.

suck, v. 15. e. intr. To practise fellatio (or cunnilingus). coarse slang.
1928 in A. W. Read Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy Western N.
Amer. (1935) 78 My cock is only 10 ins long so if any one would like
to suck meet me here 9 pm.

suck, v.  24. suck off. trans. To cause (someone) to experience an
orgasm by fellatio or cunnilingus. coarse slang.
1928 in A. W. Read Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy Western N.
Amer. (1935) 79 When will you meet me to suck me off?

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Ronald Butters <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
>
> 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.)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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