You suck.

That's right.



Ok. Maybe you don't suck. But I got your attention, right? Which brings me to this Slate article about the word "suck."

There's simply no better way than to express disapproval for things like Mel Gibson, Kirk Cameron, Progressive Rock, and Republicans than the word "suck" or "sucks."

In high school I had a teacher, who was actually one of my favorite teachers, but she went ballistic any time someone used the word suck. It's totally a generational thing. She failed to recognize how benign the word was to our generation.

That's pretty much the argument of the Slate article.

When I tell you that the new M. Night Shyamalan movie sucks (and man, does it suck), my mind in no way conjures up an image of a film reel somehow fellating an unnamed beneficiary.

Nor should this image pop up in your brain when you hear that the movie sucks. That is, unless you are obsessing over the word's origins and thus have fellatio in mind each time you encounter it. But such obsessing is silly. When someone says Bill Gates is a geek, do you picture him as a circus performer biting the head off a live chicken? Of course not.

Ok. So the image of Bill Gates biting the head off a chicken is HILARIOUS, but that's not the point.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy. Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don't require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks).

Right on, again.

For proof that this escalating battle of raunch has been going on for years, I present a fantastic exchange (click here to listen to part of it) from the 1940 film classic The Philadelphia Story. Witness a mother and daughter debating the relative merits of vulgar intransitive verbs:

Dinah Lord: "This stinks."

Margaret Lord: "Don't say stinks, darling. If absolutely necessary, smells. But only if absolutely necessary."

I remember that! Ok, now I'm just quoting the whole Slate article and agreeing, so I'll stop.