Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
I never realized how frequently I called things “lame” until I said it in front of a coworker paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. Hopefully he understood, but it just took that one glance telling me he heard it for me to stop. To try to stop.
But being lame sucks. That’s the point. Someone who is paralysed isn’t going to say it doesn’t.
Being gay doesn’t suck so it should not be used to describe something that does.
Just gonna stop in to say that ‘sucks’ in your usage is gay/misogynist slur meaning ‘sucks dick.’
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/03/suck.html
I looked myself and the term sucks goes back a bit farther than that, though, at least in England. “Sucks to your Auntie!”, is an Old English insult meaning “your Auntie be damned!”. It was said by a character in Lord of the Flies in 1954. Sinister Street was written by Compton MacKenzie in 1913 and has a sentence that reads, “This kid’s in our army, so sucks!”.
The term gained popularity in the US in the 1960s, and it isn’t really clear whether it reached America from England, or whether Americans reinvented the term from scratch with its own connotations. That being said, I’m sure many if not most people in the US used the term with the intent to imply negativity with regards to homosexuality back when the phrase was new.
Nowadays, I think the the term has been largely separated from its’ negative correlation to fellatio. Personally, I never even realized the correlation until I was very far into my adulthood, and most people my age never used the word with that meaning in mind at all.
This is kind of my point - the majority population never has any reason to think about the origin or evolution of our synonyms for bad, we just pick them up from usage - usage by older people who may have racist or xenophobic intent, or may have picked the terms up by osmosis themselves. That’s how the slurs get engrained in language. But I’m willing to bet, even if you don’t actively think of ‘sucks’ as connected to fellatio, that you’ve used ‘sucks dick’ or ‘sucks balls’ as an emphatic. (If your emphatic is ‘sucks eggs,’ then you’re even older than I imagine, and please forgive my ageism ;) )
Oh then I misunderstood what you meant by your original comment. Thanks for making me think about it, I never really thought about some of the origins of our seemingly mundane slang.
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Come on. Is that really a problem now? I get not calling people gay as an insult. But lame? I don’t even think of handicapped people at all when I hear that word.
When people talk about ‘privilege,’ this is what they mean. When you really stop to think about it, a huge amount of our casual insults/denigrations come down to slurs on anthropomorphized objects. If you believe that propagating such language is hurtful to the people the slur represents, you can make yourself crazy thinking about all the synonyms for ‘bad.’
Is it really awful? Who knows…probably depends on the degree, but one can imagine that someone actually living with whatever deviation, someone who spends their life with awareness that their ‘lameness’ means they will never be the Adonis- or Venus-like advertising model, might become hypersensitive to those words. I’m not saying that we need to shun people who use ‘sucks [dick]’ or ‘lame’ instead of ‘bad,’ but I appreciate the people who make that effort.
It’s kind of the bring-your-own-bag approach to inclusivity. Using your own bag at the grocery store isn’t going to influence climate change; stopping slur-based judgements isn’t going to end discrimination; but they’re things an individual can do to feel a little better.
I get that, I really do. Thing is, life is hard and arduous a lot of the time and I have way too many things on my mind to even link a word like ‘lame’ to a meaning like that.
And a lot of people DO shun other people for using this language, which I get when words like ‘gay’ are used as an insult.
I’d definitely not call myself privileged because I use the word ‘lame’ though.
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I still use “lame” to this day. What should I be saying instead?
I’m just gonna go back to calling everything gay and retarded now because my substitute word “lame” is now unacceptable.
Some of us never stopped! Join us. Soon the cycle will complete and those words will once again be acceptable, just like what happened with idiot and moron and savant.