suck

[George Thompson]

RB: "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.)"

Not the expression asked for, but I posted in 2007 the following:
Cunt Sucker.

This very useful term is in HDAS in its pejorative sense (#2) only from 1964, citing William Burroughs (no surprise).  In the descriptive sense, (#1), HDAS has a stray English citation from 1868, then a US cite from 1940.  A 1942 cite from Henry Miller sure sounds pejorative, but no doubt the full unquoted passage justifies putting it in #1.  Jonathon's Cassell's has 1960+ for the pejorative, 1940+ for the descriptive.  {Haven't checked his new dictionary]

New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac from the Collectiuons of the New York City Department of Records/Municipal Archives (NY: Aperture, 2006) reproduces photos taken in the first third of the 20th century by a city employe.  A photo dated September 18, 1911 shows a chalkboard in a workroom with the message

Connolly don't want to work [several illegible words] a day for a fuck like the English Cunt Sucker.  (page 30)

GAT


George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.  Working on a new edition, though.

----- Original Message -----
From: Ronald Butters <ronbutters at aol.com>
Date: Thursday, April 21, 2011 11:58 am
Subject: suck
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> 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 illuminating (and I'd love to see his unpublished article on the topic).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

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