You Suck
I just read Bil's post reminding him to post about the word "suck," and since I am pretty sure he's talking about my idea that we discussed a while back, I'm going to go ahead and post it before he does. We were talking about the widespread usage of the word "sucks" as a slang term for something bad, and I had one of my patented brilliant ideas where I peer into the soul of my fellow man and find truth. Behold:
Everyone under a certain age (and many people over it) use the word "sucks" as a synonym for bad, awful, unfair, unfortunate, pretty much anything negative. That's pretty weird, when you think of it, since vacuums or animal feeding strategies or other literal sucking things aren't really bad, per se. So how did this verb come to its slang meaning?
The thought I came up with was this: there's an implied word after sucks in the popular parlance, and that word is "dick." When people say something sucks, the implication is that it in fact "sucks dick," which is a bad thing. There's more to that, though, because I'm pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to find guys who would say that being on the receiving end of that particular action would be a bad thing. That leaves the negative part to the one doing the actual dick sucking, and that would be women and gay men. Keeping in line with the whole judeo-christia-facist obsession with controlling everyone's behavior, we have this deeply ingrained sense of dick sucking as dirty and wrong, just like sexually active women and queers.
Amazing how steathily this little piece of mysogeny and gay bashing inserted itself into the vocabulary of 9 year olds, huh? And just like a Tyler Durden splice job, no one really knows that they've said it, but they did. (Tyler: "A nice, big, COCK")
My mom used to yell at me for saying something sucked, which I never understood. Sucks isn't a bad word, mom! I don't think she thought out this line of reasoning, but deep down she knew, just as sure as we know gay guys and girls with dicks in their mouths are bad.
April 3rd, 2004 at 12:40 am
Nice. Actually, I’m glad you did that, since I doubt I could match your colorful explanation.
April 3rd, 2004 at 1:01 am
intriguing post, 2nd only to “we are friends,” by em.
April 3rd, 2004 at 9:56 am
i love to eat eat eat apples and bananas i love to oat oat oat opples and banonos like u
April 3rd, 2004 at 2:17 pm
I’ve also heard “sucks eggs,” “sucks ass.” I wouldn’t necessarily dispute your etymological suggestion, but I don’t think it’s automatically mysogynistic or gay-bashing. After all, “fucker” isn’t a hate-filled exhortation against people who copulate.
More likely these phrases are expletives simply on the basis of their shock value. Since sexuality is a deep well of shock value in our culture, our expletives tend toward the sexual.
Less socially accepted sex acts are clearly offer more bang for the buck, linguistically. Not because the speaker has singled out a class of people, but rather they are banking on their audience’s discomfort with the act itself.
April 3rd, 2004 at 2:58 pm
You’re not going back far enough. Why is sex shocking to our culture? It’s an artifact of organized monotheism, which has a long and well documented history of domination of women and marginalization of gays, probably a reaction to the paganism the monos fought against for political power.
And isn’t calling someone a fucker short for motherfucker? That’s the hat trick of disparaging someones family, calling their mother promiscuous, and evoking incest.
April 8th, 2004 at 6:57 pm
You’re correct on the “motherfucker” abbreviation. But, still, people use “fuck” alone–as an expletive and as an epithet. Witness: “You sick fuck!”
I don’t deny that there are prejudices embedded in our language, and I think you have touched on some of them. But when you say that misogyny is inserted in the vocabulary, it’s inserted deep enough to no longer be meaningful.