On the etymology of "sucks"

Surely “that blows chunks” is a reference to vomiting. :dubious:

With respect to the sexual connotation, I’m reminded of the cartoon in one magazine (don’t remember which) “Suck, Gloria, suck! ‘Blow’ is just a figure of speech!” :stuck_out_tongue:

I think you may have conflated “confalted.” :smiley:

It’s even better if she can suck an orange through a garden hose!* :cool:

*And grapefruit is top of the line! :o

Curiously, I am certain that my edition said “ass-mar.”

I remember in 1990 when CBS brought an adaptation of the movie Uncle Buck to TV. The first line in the show was Uncle Buck’s niece yelling “You suck!” at her brother. It was considered mildly controversial at the time.

I remember seeing that on TV when I was very young. He said those lines with a half a lemon in his mouth, upon which he was practicing the said verb.

Which may allude to Chapter 69 in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies, titled: “How to Succeed and How to Suck Eggs”

Speaking of British locutions—“Yah boo”? Huh? That doesn’t even quite sound like English. Of course, over here we got all these Americans going “Boo yah”… which I don’t understand the meaning of either.

I’ve seen that short numerous times. I think the pun lies in that it sounds like Curly said, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking until you do suck seed.”

On the origin of the phrase "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs"; Michael Quinion in his website World Wide Words, gives us this:

Damn! Ambushed by another zombie! I really need to be more vigilant.

I started a thread about the first use of “sucks” in film on the cafe forum yesterday. One of the references I listed was a book on racing British Ford engines written in the early 1960s I would think (can’t find the book right now). The author uses “suck it and see” fairly often, such as when you make an educated guess and change a carburetor jet, for example. In other words, try it and see what happens.

This wording is certainly not a sexual reference. Slang dictionaries cite it as “quaint” British expression. I assume derived from the mother/infant connection.

Dennis

Thanks for the info! Here is the link to the other thread, which provides more useful commentary:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=803542

That thread has a comment:

This is more or less consistent with my recollection. I remember the expression “you suck!” and “this sucks!” as a new expression sometime in the early 70s. It definitely had a sexual implication, as I remember it.

Also from that other thread:

That is also consistent with my experience. I’ve found it interesting to see how, over these many years, the expression has sort of lost its naughty sexual implications and become more acceptable in the mass media and in the mouths of politicians. But it took a long, long time to get there.

I remember that the 1979 comedy, Love at First has a scene where a character writes “Dracula sucks!” and quickly erases it as being too naughty. Looking up the film I see that the working title was in fact Dracula Sucks but apparently that didn’t make it.

Somewhere I have The Selected Letters of C.S. Lewis. In one of the letters he comments that writing for children is like writing in a foreign language or like writing poetry with a strict metrical form–and one of the restrictions is the need to avoid mention of adult topics including sexuality. (Instead, in his children’s books he focused on another passion: food) Given that comment I would find it highly unlikely that he would have used “sucks” if it had any sort of sexual connotation for him.