"We didn't realize that lite beer was supposed to suck!": The Putative Vulgarity of "X sucks" in American English

"We didn't realize that lite beer was supposed to suck!": The Putative Vulgarity of "X sucks" in American English Wl Ronald R. Butters Te didn't realize," says the voice-over in a memorable 1999 Amstel beer television commercial, "that lite beer was supposed to suck!" As anyone familiar with contemporary American English will recognize, that commercial's creators intended the audience to infer that all other "lite" beers are terrible (the meaning of suck in this context): only Amstel's naive but honest brewers, used to the production of excellent products, make a flavorful and satisfying "lite" beer in defiance of ajaded public's cynical expectations. The colloquial general pejorative use of the verb suck has been increasingly popular in American English during the past 30 years. According to the most recent edition of TheAmerican HeritageDictionary of the English Language (AHD4), suck, defined as to be disgustingly disagreeable is vulgar slang. X sucks! has in fact largely replaced an earlier generation's X stinks! as a colloquial way of saying that X is "of an extremely low or bad quality" (AHD4 s.v. stink) . There is, however, an important difference between Xsucks! and Xstinks! according to AHD4: X stinks! is merely "Slang," whereas Xsucks! is not merely "Slang," it is "Vulgar ," as well, a label that AHD4 assigns to entries to warn dictionary users that there are "social taboos attached to a word; ... [these are] words that violate accepted standards of decency" (2000, xxxiii). AHD4 is scarcely alone in its belief in the putative offensiveness of X sucks! This most recent of authoritative American dictionaries merely echoes earlier dictionary makers of the 1980s and 1990s. How can dictionary makers plausibly maintain that Xsucks!is "vulDictionaries :Journal ofthe Dictionary Soäety ofNorth America 22 (2001) We didn't realize that lite beer was supposed to suck131 gar," given the fact that die idiom is extremely widespread in American culture, heard commonly and widely in contexts (e.g., television commercials ) where violations of "accepted standards of decency" by "taboo" words are uncommon? Why would they ever have concluded mat it was a "taboo" word in the first place? In brief, the answer is that Xsucks! might be seen as an offensive idiom because it can call to mind the use of the word suck to refer to fellatio, a sexual practice about which many people seem to have mixed emotions. Even speakers who do not find Xsucks! offensive still may feel mat the idiom somehow refers to fellatio, wheuier or not they have positive or negative feelings towards fellation itself. For example , the gay-friendly columnist Blanche Poubelle notes in commenting on an oral version of this paper (presented on 6January 2000 at die American Dialect Society meeting) , that "many listeners had strong intuitions that it [XsucL·!] originates in a reference to oral sex" (2000, 8). The connection with 'fellatio' must of course somehow be accounted for in the lexical analysis of suck, even if, as I believe, the fellatio connotations of XsucL·! are a matter of significant post-facto etymologizing . More important, however, is die question of how an idiom mat might be offensive to many people could have become so widespread, particularly if the offensiveness relates to the associations of the idiom with fellatio. For some speakers, fellatio is in itself distasteful or even immoral , a forbidden topic for conversation, or even allusion. For others, referring to fellatio in odier than a clinical or intimate setting would be impolite. For still others, to refer to fellatio in a disparaging way would in itself be semantically or socially inappropriate, since, for many people , fellatio is highly pleasurable, and those who engage therein, whether as fellator or fellatee, ought not to be die object of the scorn implied by connecting pejorative XsucL·! to fellatio. Clearly, speakers attach connotations of fellatio and vulgarity to X sucL·! for the most part only when the specific issue of putative etymology is raised; most of the time, for most speakers, fellatio and vulgarity are not a part of the foregrounded semantic range of die idiom. Only in this way could speakers accept a phrase that diey would otherwise find inappropriate. The etymology of Xsucks...