21st Sep 2003
To Suck
I woke up this morning with a memory of when I was maybe 10 years old and playing Little League baseball, and my best friend, Kevin, hit a home run. He was on the other team, so as he was rounding third, I shouted in an envious but good-natured way, “You suck!”
My father then pulled me over by the elbow and said, “Don’t say that! That means that he sucks penises.” You can imagine my horror at trying to get my 10-year-old mind around that one.
Dad was of a much different generation, 10-20 years older than everyone else’s dads. Maybe that was the literal origin of the usage, but I’m relieved to see this morning that Dictionary.com indeed recognizes the intransitive sense of “suck,” in which one exists simply in a general state of suckiness, with no implication of sucking any direct object in particular.
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