559
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
559 points (92.4% liked)
Ask Lemmy
26996 readers
975 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
But being lame sucks. That's the point. Someone who is paralysed isn't going to say it doesn't.
Being gay doesn't suck so it should not be used to describe something that does.
Just gonna stop in to say that 'sucks' in your usage is gay/misogynist slur meaning 'sucks dick.'
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/03/suck.html
I looked myself and the term sucks goes back a bit farther than that, though, at least in England. "Sucks to your Auntie!", is an Old English insult meaning "your Auntie be damned!". It was said by a character in Lord of the Flies in 1954. Sinister Street was written by Compton MacKenzie in 1913 and has a sentence that reads, "This kid's in our army, so sucks!".
The term gained popularity in the US in the 1960s, and it isn't really clear whether it reached America from England, or whether Americans reinvented the term from scratch with its own connotations. That being said, I'm sure many if not most people in the US used the term with the intent to imply negativity with regards to homosexuality back when the phrase was new.
Nowadays, I think the the term has been largely separated from its' negative correlation to fellatio. Personally, I never even realized the correlation until I was very far into my adulthood, and most people my age never used the word with that meaning in mind at all.
This is kind of my point - the majority population never has any reason to think about the origin or evolution of our synonyms for bad, we just pick them up from usage - usage by older people who may have racist or xenophobic intent, or may have picked the terms up by osmosis themselves. That's how the slurs get engrained in language. But I'm willing to bet, even if you don't actively think of 'sucks' as connected to fellatio, that you've used 'sucks dick' or 'sucks balls' as an emphatic. (If your emphatic is 'sucks eggs,' then you're even older than I imagine, and please forgive my ageism ;) )
Oh then I misunderstood what you meant by your original comment. Thanks for making me think about it, I never really thought about some of the origins of our seemingly mundane slang.