When did suck acquire a pejorative sense?
I just grabbed the nearest paper dictionary, Random House College 1972, not my favorite of the dozen dictionaries in the house but it will do for now, and under suck there is not the least notion of: my job sucks, our shortstop sucks, that movie really sucked.
But it is undeniably common now, that sense of disgust and failure. How did it arise?
Think about sucking. A baby at the nipple, exchanging nurture and nourishment, love and grateful satiation. Purely pleasurable. (Yeah, I get the teething thing, but grant me the generalities, ok?, it’s late.) An eager lady kneeling at her partner’s feet, mouth busy, active, engaged, eager, agile, trained or in training, thrilling herself with how much she delights him, thrilling him with how — spurt spurt spurt spurt — oh, my, that was good.
Where does the anger come from? The disdain? The… dismissal?
If a fellow comes back from a date, and a roommate asks: how did it go? Is the answer: “She sucked” a boast or a complaint?
This is not facetious, I really want to know what happened here. Anyone? Where did the word lose its beauty?
— Frenulum
The OED's earliest citation is from 1971: "It 2–16 June 3/2 Polaroid sucks! For some time the Polaroid Corporation has been supplying the South African government with large photo systems…to use for photographing blacks for the passbooks…every black must carry." I'm not sure what It is. A magazine, maybe? There is an (it) magazine, about social-justice-y stuff, but it was founded in 2003.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Amy, for tracing the citation and the date. If it could be used understandably in an article then, the sense-shift from delight to disgust must have been in the language earlier. I still don't get it (and still don't say it that way).
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