That great sucking sound you hear is the unlovely but onomatopoeic word “suck” echoing unimpeded throughout the land. Use of the word has become so indiscriminate–not to say promiscuous–that it demands attention as a significant social phenomenon.
The recent performance of the song, “It Sucks to Be Me,” during the televised Tony Awards–the song’s show, “Avenue Q,” took the prize for best musical–confirms the elevated status of “suck.” But “suck” has been the word of choice to express how something “has strong negative aspects” for more than a decade. As early as 1987, a poster for the film “Full Metal Jacket” contained the line, “In Vietnam the wind doesn’t blow it sucks.” Among the young, for whom–like Hollywood–being the first in the know is a matter of survival, the usage took hold early.
I first became aware of the word as common verbal coin in the late 1980s when a friend of my son’s–then 7 or 8–pronounced something “sucky.” I later told my son that this was a vulgar expression not to be used at the dinner table, always a convenient expedient for dealing with the undefinably unpleasant. I didn’t actually tell him it was a bad word. I didn’t really know. And being lazy, I failed to undertake rigorous examination and analysis.
This, I can see now, was a serious mistake, clearly repeated by others in homes, workplaces and schools across the country. Like some superficially attractive but ultimately noxious weed–purple loosestrife, say–suck was allowed to spread without hindrance, no attention paid to its native vigor, prodigious adaptability and relentless reproductive powers. Today it is ineradicable.
This state of affairs is due directly to the critical failure to classify “suck” as a bad word, render it obscene, FCC-banished and parentally dither-producing. My daughter tells me that in 5th grade–around the mid-1990s–the most worldly wise of her friends declared authoritatively that “suck” and “crap” were not officially dirty words and thus OK to use. Licensed to the young, “suck” spread to the grown-up world. (There are still refined adults who use the dainty locution, “As the young people say, it sucks.”) At the crucial moment, the hard line was not taken.
Should it have been? Well, just what do we mean when we say, “It sucks?” Are we ready to deal with that issue, or would we rather just drop it because we can’t do anything about it anyway? Is it sort of like telling someone there was a cockroach in his salad after he’s greedily eaten the whole thing up? Or perhaps words, like some politicians, are allowed “youthful indiscretions.” Because “suck” had unsavory associations years ago, are we justified in raking up that old stuff now? Should “suck” get a break? Has “suck” reformed?
I don’t know. Perhaps a prestigious panel of linguistics experts and etymologists should be appointed to prepare a judicious report. Or even a grand jury convened. Is there enough evidence to indict? And for what? Corrupting public morals? An intriguing prospect.
Until then, however, some preliminary musings are permissible. Normally, “suck” is a transitive verb, taking an object. John sucks . . . something, just like Ted hits something (or Jack bites something, but that’s a sidetrack for another time). John may suck a prune or a persimmon or suck soda through a straw. So if we say “John sucks,” we are implying an object.
Now John sucking soda is not inherently gross or disgusting or even too dorky, so the verb’s negative aspect must come from something about the object sucked. Before current usage, sucking was discretely neutral. Hence the idea must be that John is sucking something bad or that for some reason he ought not to suck.
What could that be? The blue-ribbon panel or grand jury should give that question high priority. I recall from the dim days of my youth the phrase, “teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.” I believe it meant brashly presuming to instruct those older and wiser, but I always thought it reflected poorly on Grandma. The grand jury should look into this too.
Clearly, however, “suck,” as part of its rehabilitation project, is trying to become intransitive, taking no object, sucking away unaccompanied or even, reflexively, on itself. (A halfway point to this splendid isolation is the compound “suck up,” which has its own history.) In the end that may ensure “suck’s” respectability, in the manner of a social climber who has cast off embarrassing relations to mingle with the best society. (Does the president say, “France sucks?” Don’t bet against it.)
A cursory dictionary search confirms the point. The entry for the verb “suck” in a college dictionary from the 1950s denotes it as transitive, with a single intransitive variant (having to do with the physical ability to suck displayed by a drain or baby). Today in online dictionaries the intransitive listings rival the transitive.
But the transitive skeleton is still in the intransitive closet. For instance, in the online edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the last numbered entry in both intransitive and transitive variants has “Vulgar Slang” listings. For intransitive the definition is “to be disgustingly disagreeable or offensive.” For transitive: “To perform fellatio on.” Is there a parallel? Could the vulgar mob be conflating the transitive and intransitive meanings?
Some say no. The Wordwizard Web site reports that two researchers from Duke University, writing in reference to the court case of a junior high school student disciplined for wearing a T-shirt that said “Drugs Suck,” argued that “suck” is a non-sexual pejorative whose allusion to oral-genital contact has been successfully marginalized.
But the skeleton in the closet is rattling hard. Call it coincidence, but in the past few years there has been increasing public discussion of oral sex.
A recent New York Times Magazine article about the death of teen romance extensively explored “hooking up,” a teen ritual largely involving sex without intergenital communication. Many blame this trend on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whose politically thunderous indiscretion almost brought down a presidency and yielded a semen stain that would be pure gold on eBay. But it’s at least as likely that an evolution of language predating the Clinton era had already paved that way for an evolution of manners. Mixed-group lunchtime discussion of oral sex has for some years been routine at many high schools. Heroic feats of fellatio by certain classmates are recounted, brought up as casually as the odd smell in Mr. Applewhite’s U.S. history class or the different colors of toe fungus.
Still, for all that “suck’s” usage has become commonplace, it continues to cause embarrassment. Attempts to inaugurate serious discussion of the word’s recent history are likely to yield awkward silences and quick changes of subject. We are infected by an epidemic avoidance of the obvious on an emperor-has-no-clothes scale.
Can a society survive such hypocrisy at the roots of its daily discourse? Perhaps. Maybe we have a deep instinct not to know what we’re talking about. Maybe it’s an evolutionary adaptational necessity. But at the very least the question isn’t trivial. The grand jury has much work to do.
