Is the term "you suck" always considered slang? [closed]
Yes, you can use the word in the way that you have described, but it's considered more harsh than polite, and it has somewhat vulgar overtones. How it's regarded or received might be generational.
I typed is suck vulgar? on Google, and found mixed responses. Feel free to do the same if you want diverse opinions on the matter. I thought this excerpt from a blog post, though, was worth pasting into an answer here:
Some may not believe this, but suck — as in “Man, this class sucks” — was also in the raw obscenity category when I was a teenager. It was used plenty in the school hallways but not in front of your teacher and never in front of your mother. I remember some agitation by certain culturally-advanced youngsters who tried to railroad their elders into accepting sucks as a safe and harmless substitute for stinks. The elders weren’t having any of it, last I checked, but the liberalizing linguists seem to have carried the day. I have always assumed—rightly or wrongly, I do not know — that the word was originally intended to carry sexual overtones, which was the reason for its suppression. Today, the sexual overtones are either forgotten or are now acceptable in mixed company. I’m not sure which explanation disturbs me more.
I think you and your friend are unlikely to come up with an agreed-upon viewpoint, because you're both right in a way. Feel free to use it on message boards and the like when you want to express a negative opinion, but realize you'll risk sounding a bit uncouth to some when you do.
Then again, maybe I'm just showing my age here.
As a footnote, you might want to check out our sister site, English Language Learners.
Yes, as used in the OP, "sucks" is always slang.
SUCKS transitive verb; slang: a. To be highly unpleasant or disagreeable: This job sucks. b. To be of poor or inferior quality: The acting in that movie sucked. c. To be inept: I suck at math. see TFD
The fixed-phrase “this/that SUCKS dick/cock” gained currency exclusively among male American youth in the early 1970’s as a derogatory slang expression of general contempt for some object, activity, or person. The phrase was, as intended, unapologetically misogynistic and homophobic. In the seventies, female youth never employed this idiom. No surprise there, though this is no longer the case. By the late seventies, probably in order to evade adult censure (and since youth knew precisely what was intended), the last word of the phrase was dropped. If the term is currently considered to be non-vulgar it is most likely due to this partial sanitization and because contemporary youth are ignorant of the original misogynistic and homophobic intent. see, ELU; UE;
Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960) has some interesting commentary on suck and the seemingly allied phrases suck around, suck [someone] in, suck off, and suck up to [someone]. Of that entire group, only one term, suck off, is characterized as "taboo" across the board:
suck off [taboo] 1 To commit cunnilingus or fellatio. --> 2 To curry favor with a superior or influential person. Fig[uratively] and scornfully, to be willing to do anything to curry favor.
Wentworth & Flexner lists suck itself as taboo in the first sense of the word, but draws a fine line between suck and suck off in the second sense:
suck v.i., v.t. 1 [taboo] To perform cunnilingus or, esp., fellatio. --> 2 To curry favor with people in in authority. Although not taboo, prob. from "suck off."
The other three closely related terms are not treated as taboo in any respect:
suck around To hang around a place or person with a view of gaining preference or favors.
suck [someone] in To deceive; esp. to deceive by making false promises.
suck up to [someone] To curry favor with someone by being exceptionally agreeable, or by doing menial jobs for that person. Cf. suck off.
And finally, Wentworth & Flexner offers this entry for egg-sucker:
egg-sucker n. One who seeks advancement through flattery rather than work; a "weasel."
This last term may help explain the non-taboo status of many of the terms in the suck family as of 1960. The notoriety of weasels as egg suckers goes back at least to Shakespeare's day. Indeed, Shakespeare alludes to this reputation twice—in Henry V:
Westmoreland. But there's a saying, very old and true, —
If that you will France win,
Then with Scotland first begin:
For once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs;
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,
To spoil and havoc more than she can eat.
and again in As You Like It (in the voice of the melancholy Jaques):
I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.
It may be, then, that saying "You suck" to someone has always had the fallback implication "You are a weasel" if the insinuation "You [metaphorically or actually] perform oral sex on people for personal advancement" seems too harsh or dangerous for the speaker to own up to.
To complicate things further, in the 55 years since the first edition of Wentworth & Flexner appeared, the term suck has acquired additional and more generalized meanings. Thus, Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995) opens its entry for suck this way:
suck 1 v by 1928 To do fellatio =EAT 2 v (also suck rope, suck eggs) by 1971 To be disgusting or extremely reprehensible; be of wretched quality; =ROT, STINK [examples omitted]
So "You suck" can be used jocularly in the sense of "You stink" or vehemently in the sense of "You are reprehensible" or contemptuously in the sense of "You are willing to provide sexual favors to someone in return for unspecified rewards."
Under the circumstances, it's easy to see why the person telling someone "You suck" and the person being told by someone "You suck" might seriously disagree as to the phrase's meaning.
It is not exactly foul language, but it is considered vulgar and rather common to use "suck" in this context. There are better words to express discontent or dismay at inefficiency of something. On another note, the term is usually applied to things or situations, not people; it is said that "something sucks" but it's unusual to hear that "someone sucks".
The history and etymology of the phrase has been discussed in the other answers, and for that reason, another two factors to consider are 1. age and 2. dialect of the speaker. I am fifty one, exactly of the "male youth of the early 1970s" age in Little Eva's answer, so I'd NEVER use the word to someone my own age. As for my children: that's quite a different matter: the word is much less strong between people of my daughter's age and I have heard it used by 10 year olds in a way not unlike that meant by the OP.
Although the usage in Australia in the 1970s was definitely highly derogatory - to call someone a "suck" was to class them amongst the most contemtible - it was used by males AND females equally and never in the full form "suck dick". Most of us were utterly oblivious to the sexual connotations and it did not have a homophobic taint - even though this was in a culture that was (and continues to be) extremely homophobic. Naive as this may sound, I never even considered the rather obvious in hindsight sexual connotations until reading Sven Yargs's most interesting answer. This is probably because it had lost currency by the time I and my peers reached sexual age. Another thing about the usage here at the time that may explain my naivety: its main connotation, as I recall it, was one of disingenuousness and untrustworthiness. I also read As You Like It when I was 11, found the allusion to weasels sucking eggs and was ever after certain this was the origin, simply because (1) the word "weasel" also bore a very like connotation to "a suck" at the time and (2) the kinds of personal qualities Shakespeare clearly meant to convey in his egg sucking weasel metaphors matched the 1970s Australian usage near perfectly. I'm not the only one mistaken about etymology in this way: the word has come into usage by our children (but not nearly with the same strength of venom) and I have heard other grown ups explain to their children that it came from Shakespeare. As I said, I think any Australian of my age who read As You Like It would naturally have assumed the mistaken Shakespearean etymology as the word was so near in its meaning to Shakespeare's weasels.