I suppose I should be writing this in the Journal of Linguistics or the International Journal of Lexicography, but I have a feeling those outlets are not as widely read as this one, so I’m making my case for reformed word usage here, and I trust your indulgence.
My concern is for the word “suck” and how it is being used, frequently in all forms of discourse, in a derogatory sense to means something bad, distasteful, or ugly—or something simply not to the user’s taste. My concern, of course, is that the use of the word this way should be considered vulgar, pejorative, and offensive, since it derives in fairly recent history from the phrase “cocksucker” and its pejorative use as in “he sucks.” It was an insult to homosexuals from the beginning, and I know nothing about it except its contemporary overuse that diminishes this denigration and belittlement.
The OED argues that the sense of “suck” as in oral sex is first used in 1928 in a lexicography book, but other sources say it can be found much earlier as in “suck below thy waste” in a 1631 play by Englishman James Shirley. And it was in common use by the end of the end of the 19th century, where it was used repeatedly in a pornographic magazine in 1879 and 1880.
The use of the word in a nonsexual derogatorial sense in regular discourse is said to have started in the 1970s, as in a June 1971 issue of the International Times saying “Polaroid sucks.” I remember hearing it, and blushing, in that decade, though in speech, not in any writing I read then. I thought the rise of the gay rights movement after the Stonewall riots in 1969 (down the street from where I was then living) would quickly put an end to that use, but it was never publicly addressed as far as I know and the word kept cropping up. It even got to television, on a Saturday Night Live broadcast in 1977.
To give you some idea of its prevalence today, here are some samples at random from Reddit, the worldwide social media network that is a perfect reflection of the tastes of the time: “Recent Pokemon Games suck” (2018), “Why do Steam sales suck?” (2021), “Adobe products suck” (2022), “The recent patches suck (2023). There is no suggestion that any of the users means any connection with a sex act or anything special beyond the declaration that something is in some way bad.
Slate magazine argued in a 2006 article that the word was perfectly good to use these days and “suck-haters are living in the past.” But—because I know where the word comes from and can’t unknow it—I still find the word offensive and think it should not be used in normal polite discourse. I am not a homosexual, so there is nothing personal in filing this complaint. It’s simply an urge to make our language precise and useful as possible.
Thesaurus.com lists 35 different synonyms for “bad,” and it doesn’t include “suck.” We ought to be able to agree to use one of them.
