Yes, so does “this blows”, and we have fair certainty that the term originated as “this blows chunks”, and it too is now used in phrases such as “blows goats”.
I suspect that as society became cruder, or at least more tolerant of crudity in children, a lot of older and politer words became corrupted into crude form. “Insult-head” would be another example, starting out with mild insults such as “pumpkin head” and degenerating into “dick head”. Despite that, dickhead doesn’t refer to the head of a penis, though they seem to go together quite naturally.
On a related note, where does the term " go suck an egg come from? What the heck is egg sucking anyway? I remember Miss Rachel Lynde in Anne of Green Gables telling Marilla about an adopted boy who used to suck eggs.
I’d been thinking about starting a thread asking where ‘Don’t try to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs!’ comes from. So since you brought up sucking eggs, I’ll ask in this thread.
Manduck says it’s a real thing. But did the serious practice start because of the phrase? Or did the phrase come from egg-suckers? The way I read it, the phrase means ‘You’re attempting to instruct someone who knows much more about the subject than you do.’ Presumably it would be just as useless to attempt to instruct one’s grandmother to suck eggs. But is it futile because Grandma already knows how to poke holes in an egg and suck it down? (Assume she enjoys raw egg.) Or is it because Grandma is too experienced to fall for the prank of trying to make her eat a raw egg? (Assume that people don’t generally like eating raw eggs.)
We just read Prince Caspian last week and I had the same reaction! I spent an hour or two reading different webpages on the origin of that phrase. It actually took me out of the moment in the book.
I always heard that it was an insult between men. If you told a man that he “sucks” that meant that he sucked dick and was therefore a homosexual. This, of course, was back in the stone ages when there was something wrong with that.
Any truth in that? I couldn’t find much evidence elsewhere.
I imagine it could also refer to (homosexual) fellatio, or to a baby breast-feeding as a slur “you’re so immature still sucking the teat”. Maybe a combined origin thing.
I can’t imagine the UK use of ‘sucks’ has that Jazz etymology too though.
As someone else has unearthed this fly-infested thread: maybe ‘sucks’ refers to ‘thumb-sucking’. Not that it can’t have evolved separately from other roots too.
All I can say is that in my sniggering adolescent years (mid-60s), my friends and I were quite certain as to the derivation of both “That sucks!” AND “That blows,” and that it was unquestionably sexual.
I can’t be the only one that, at least for a time, took a bit of an involuntary gasp of breath upon first hearing “That sucks” tossed around so casually in mainstream media by succeeding generations.
