[Ads-l] "X sucks" in the East Village Other

James Landau 00000c13e57d49b8-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Mon Jan 20 01:31:34 UTC 2020


On  Sat, 18 Jan 2020 15:34:45 Zone-0500
Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>As a lark, I looked to see how far back I can find "sucks eggs", and that
>also goes back to 1966 in Google:
>You Can Always Tell A Harvard Man
>Richard Bissell   eNet Press, 1966    p191
The phrase "suck eggs" appears in Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_ (1962) and according to Google Books in _Starman Jones_ (1953).  I believe Heinlein's meaning of the phrase significantly differs from the meaning in this thread. Aside to Ben Zimmer who wrote "Previously I found a poem with the line  "EVERYTHING SUCKS!!" printed in The Paper, a Michigan State publication, in its Oct. 13, 1966 issue (and reprinted later that year in The Screw from Univ. of Kansas):" I was at Michigan State from fall 1965 to spring 1969 and I remember The Paper.  If memory serves, The Paper began publishing in the fall of 1966, so Oct 13 1966 must have been one of its first issues, if not the first.   James Landau
jjjrlandau at netscape.com

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list