Secrets of the City

I’m gonna play OED for a moment and postulate that it started with the “Mean People Suck” bumper stickers from the ’90s.

It’s a good thing I’m not ordering up signs… as I apparently can’t spell “Common” correctly.

Hey, what can you say? Stuff sucks.

I suck.

I remember seeing a video on branding that said every attempt at marketing was an attempt to prove your product sucks less than everyone else’s. Maybe this is the beginning of truth in advertising?

Maybe they’ve realized that much of the newest generation of moneyed professionals with disposable income are young enough to have grown up with ironic, irreverent, postmodern influences all around them. Don’t have a cow, man!

Why do we say SUCK cock yet BLOW job?

(Typo fixed.)

Cause our jobs blow.

Good one, Kevin.

There’s a new ad on the radio for a car place, too, that talks about getting a car that doesn’t suck. WTF?

Showgirls, anyone?

I thought that this said girls that don’t suck, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Linguists think the sexual connotation of “blow job” evolved from “blowoff”, an expression meaning to finish off, to climax, to end. “Blowoff” in this sense is related to “blow off steam”, to put an end to an emotionally frustrating experience. When a prostitute gave a client a blow job she was helping him blow off the steam of sexual arousal. In the 1930s, streetwalkers offered oral with the phrase, “I’ll blow you off.” It suggests “I’ll cool you down,” “I’ll release your steam.”

(From a book I have called Sexy Origins and Intimate Things.)

WCOO story on sucking.

Blame it on the “dumbing down of America”. We’ve become less sensitive to slang, and particularly crass slang. It’s pitiful.

I’m not sure it’s a “dumbing down.” I think people are very desensitized to the hundreds of marketing messages that they encounter every day. Using “suck” seems to me another way advertisers tap the “counter culture,” such as it is. Anything to stand out from the pack.

Personally, I think it works in this case. Advertising should speak our language. If I asked you what you thought of some product you were really excited about, yould say something like, “it fucking rocks!” But we can’t say what wew really mean, so we gradually, very gradually, push the envelope.

It’s not pitiful at all. It’s how language evolves. We (and by we I mean the general population, not just tweens, teens and twenty-somethings) use plenty of words that at one point were considered verboten in polite conversation.

Pray tell, what is that thou speatheth of?

when i was an angst-ridden teenager, i used to be pretty fond of saying one thing or another “sucked.” whenever my dad would hear me say it, he’d ask me to elaborate… he said that saying something “sucks” is just so vague and nondescriptive. i’m glad he used to do that because, though i still use the word, it’s nice to have learned a few better, more accurate ways to express myself. if in 50 years the only way people can say they don’t like something is that it sucks, we’re not going to have a heck of a lot to talk about.

I’m old enough to remember when “sucks” was a fairly strong (if second-tier) epithet. How is the fact that it’s now toothless enough to be used in advertising necessarily a bad thing?

Saying something sucks is now no more or less offensive to most people than saying it stinks, or it’s substandard, or it’s unfortunate. I think the word has lost its ability to shock much more than we’ve lost our ability to be shocked.