117. Are you still bothered by "sucks"?

Well, you shouldn't be. Six years ago, according to Seth Stevenson in Slate (slate.com), sucks was growing "less obscene by the minute" and even then it was "completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act." People who had fellatio "popping up in their brains" were simply "obsessing over the word's origins."

Stevenson rebuked bothered readers not only for their Victorian prurience but for their linguistic naïveté: "Language moves on, and the sucks-haters are living in the past." And, judging by current quotes in the Times (the reporters never use it), Stevenson's rebuke is justified. The minute-by-minute gains have added up to a smashing victory for "sucks."

Not that the sucks-haters couldn't have seen it coming. Even in 2005, church communication professionals at Church Marketing Sucks (churchmarketing.com) were worrying more about "marketing" being taken as a dirty word than they were about "sucks."

Stevenson loves "sucks," right down to the "k" it ends with. The "sticky consonants" (k,q,x,z) turn him on. And apparently his love is widely shared. The concision, the punchiness, the sassiness — who could resist it? Reading Stevenson now I'm ready to climb on the bandwagon myself. The word is so great for gutty understatement. A fellow with the deadly nerve disorder CMT is interviewed by a Times reporter. What does he say about it? "It sucks." My plucky daughter has her first child. What does she say? "Labor sucks."

It's clear that a lot of people are bothered by "sucks" for the wrong reasons: that it's misplaced raunch, or it's a misused verb. They don't see how much raunch is at home nearly everyplace now, and they haven't yet seen that intransitive verbs really can express merit or its opposite.

Not that the latter is easy to see. Older people who hear that exams, or bridesmaids' dresses, or braking systems suck, are bound to have a sense of misuse. They just haven't seen many intransitive verbs do that kind of evaluation. But they're there for them to see, and Stevenson is right on the mark when he points them out. "Kate Winslet rocks." If Kate Winslet can rock Anne Coulter can suck.

Those still bothered by "sucks" need to ask themselves, "Is it the word that's bothering me or is it the judgment the word is making?" I once heard a student, talking to another about our Bible as Literature course, say, "OK, OK, the Old Testament is pretty good — but the New Testament sucks." If he had used the word "stinks" (the one sucks-haters most often want to substitute) I don't think my reaction would have been much different. I think that what is true of the Bible is true of many serious things. We don't like to hear young people kissing them off.

So, I pretty well agree with Stevenson. But I think there's still something about "sucks" worth worrying about. It's those images that usage is supposed to have buried. Are they really dead? When you first run through the quotes in last month's Times — Mitt Romney's latest attack ad sucks, Americanized Thai food sucks, the groundhog feature sucks — you just can't imagine sexual activity. Those things are so far from being capable of it. But then, the same week, you hear, "Tim Tebow sucks." You have to ask, "Are my image-producing neurons as dead as they were when Thai food was sucking?" If not, if sexual images can rise from the grave, there's definitely a problem.

The problem is disruption of our own purpose in using the language. We want to say "Her boyfriend is no good" and we say "Her boyfriend sucks" and some percentage (who knows what?) of our listeners are distracted by the totally irrelevant sexual image. That gets in the way of what we want to say about the boyfriend, or Tebow. Our statement loses some punch. (Here's where the geezers say, "See. Wouldn't happen if you'd said, 'Her boyfriend stinks.'")

What most complicates our problem with the pop-up images, though, is that sometimes we want them. Authors want us to have them. English teachers want their students to have them. When my students came to the word "pitched" in Yeats's lines, "But Love has pitched his mansion in/ the place of excrement," I wanted the image of a thick, dark, sticky substance to pop into their minds. That image came from the past, and went with a meaning much older (pitch, from Latin pix) than the meaning that suppressed it (to set up — as to pitch a tent). I would have been sorry if they had missed that, Eros blackening his own home, the grossness we're all stuck with.

Maybe sexual images are like matches: you want to save them for what's really worth heating up. If I were a reader in the seventeenth century I'd hate to have used so many of my matches on everyday things that I didn't have any left for the things John Donne talks about. Like his wife's soul when he comes home after a long trip. It "grows erect." A soul. An immaterial thing. And this is a woman's soul. Everything — logic, primary meaning, dominant culture — is against the inflammatory image. And yet today's English teacher (with, I can't help seeing, Donne behind him) is going to be cheering for it. "Go! Go! Add physical desire. Open the door to the image. Light up the house." That's partly a cheer for good reading, what English teachers teach. Readers who enrich a line with pop-up images are better readers than those who don't.

About "sucks" we have to say that sometimes it furthers and enriches and sometimes it obstructs and impoverishes. Does widespread impoverishment ruin it for enrichment? Not necessarily. Word-effects are not zero-sum. The comparison to matches is not perfect.

What would we lose if we lost "sucks"? Some pretty good play, I must admit. Maybe even geezers can forgive a word when it makes for cute clues in a crossword puzzle. The Wordplay Blog recently noticed this one for "vampire bat": "It really sucks."