"this sucks" (and more)

[Charles C Doyle]

A fairly well-known academic legend tells of a professor who belatedly (and, it now seems, archaically) asks a secretary to type and duplicate a poem for use as a handout to accompany his lecture, and he gives her an old facsimile text (in some versions of the legend, of Donne's "The Good Morrow"; in others, of Shakespeare's song "Where the bee sucks, there suck I").  The secretary, unfamiliar with the "long s," mistakes the word "suck" for "fuck" (or should I say substitutes "suck" with "fuck"?), so that the blindly-distributed handout shockingly reads "fuck."

--Charlie

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of David A. Daniel [dad at POKERWIZ.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 9:16 AM

Hmmm. I wonder how they told the difference... ;)
DAD
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Actually, if you use 18th century typography, fuck and suck are *less* than
one letter apart.

JL

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:49 AM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:

>
>
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>
> On sucks: the T-Shirt, bumper-sticker, book-title phrase "there is no such
> thing as gravity, the Earth sucks" goes back several decades as I recall,
> and this obviously makes reference to what one does with a straw in a
> milkshake, or what a vacuum cleaner does, or what M Lewinsky was
> accomplished in, as it is the sucking action that would draw one to Earth,
> and apparently also refers to the idea of just being bad, unpleasant or
> substandard and, well, sucky. On the other hand, today, whether or not
> someone thinks that sucks has to do strictly with fellatio probably
depends
> on the age of the person in question. Younger person - no fellatio; Older
> person - fellatio. It would be interesting to take a poll... I also think
> sucks is popular because suck and fuck are just one letter apart and thus
> both have that good old Anglo Saxon guttural, ugly-sounding clout to them,
> kind of makes them a complementary pair.
>
> On KHJ: L.A.'s KHJ was actually "Boss Radio 93". KFWB was "Channel 98,
> Color
> Radio". I don't remember either one calling itself kick-ass, but then I
> don't remember everything... They were both Top 40-type stations for a
> while, then KFWB went all news in 1968.
> DAD
>
>
>
>
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>  ---
>
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
> >
>
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/on-the-taboo-avoidance-patrol/
> >
>
> FWIW, in the '60's, L.A.'s Radio KHJ, Channel 98, featured not only
> "color" radio, but also "kick-ass" radio, according to its main DJ, a
> white guy who called himself "Yo' Bruthuh."
>
> At that time, that a white guy should speak so on the public airwaves
> kicked *much* ass, even in LA-LA LAnd.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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