I leeched this one from the New York Times. Heehee...

There is even a doily! How I adore doilies.




HELLO, SUCKER
By William Safire


I would suggest moving back,” said President Bush, from the cab of a yellow Caterpillar tractor at the company’s East Peoria, Ill., plant. “I’m about to crank this sucker up.” He started the engine, watched a puff of smoke belch from the stack, steered the machine around the assembly line and announced, “That was fun,” as he got off.

The local press caught the carefully staged symbolism of a dynamic economy and global demand for American construction equipment, not to mention more well-paying jobs thanks to a free-trade policy. But the message that got through to language mavens around the English-speaking world was that another new meaning had been accepted, at the highest level of government, in the saga of a great old English word.

All of us who cavorted at the bee’s-knees speak-easies in the 1920s, swilling bathtub gin and waving feather boas to the tune of the “Charleston,” fondly recall the image of Mary Louise (Texas) Guinan perched atop a stool in the middle of the El Fay Club in Manhattan, greeting every wide-eyed “big butter-and-egg man” from out of town with her trademark shout, “Hello, sucker!”

That roughly affectionate use of sucker was derived from its meaning of “simpleton; a gullible mark often fooled, hoodwinked, swindled or otherwise easily taken advantage of.” The metaphoric source, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, is that of a young mammal before it is weaned from its mother’s teat, calling to mind a picture of a suckling pig. The great lexicon’s earliest citation in this sense is from an 1838 Toronto Patriot: “It’s true that pigs has their troubles like humans ... constables catches ’em, dogs bite ’em, and pigs is sometimes as done-over suckers as men.”

That sense of gullibility was exemplified in several famous American sayings, like “Never give a sucker an even break,” falsely ascribed in the 1880s to the showman Phineas T. Barnum by a rival impresario. The Barnum biographer A. H. Saxton credits Paper Collar Joe Bessimer, a notorious confidence man, with “There’s a sucker born every minute, but none of them ever die.” To be fair, the bumptious Barnum never claimed coinage; indeed, according to the Columbia World of Quotations, he later thanked his envious rival for the publicity. (P. T. Barnum is legendarily remembered for suckering his circus customers with a sly exit sign, “This way to the egress,” which enticed paying visitors to leave a crowded tent in the hope of seeing a live egress, presumably a caged female eager.)

Paper Collar Joe’s born-every-minute aphorism lives: in a segment about outlandish gifts on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Diane Sawyer recently admitted buying a “Memory Pillo,” confessing, “Because if there’s a sucker born every minute, I’m the sucker born in my minute.” In the 1936 film “Poppy,” W. C. Fields first said, “Never give a sucker an even break,” which reinforced the sense of a sucker being a born “loser.”

Other senses of the word live on inside longer locutions: vampires, always a popular attraction in horror movies, are bloodsuckers, and media pundits, proliferating madly in the blogosphere, present their views in what we like to call thumbsuckers.

Even so, many feel slightly uncomfortable using the verb suck or a noun built on it. In a column about teenage slang a few years back, I reported that the term being used to describe what we used to call soul-kissing, or French kissing — a pleasurable form of osculation, if somewhat sloppy — is now sucking face. Some readers found that phrase to be unsuitably descriptive, even odious, and urged that its users be banished to tonsil-hockey’s penalty box. The same adult distaste is shown toward such innocent childlike derogations as “Algebra sucks.”

I ran this hidden concern past Grant Barrett, editor of Oxford’s excellent political etymology, “Hatchet Jobs and Hardball,” a host of the KPBS public-radio show “A Way With Words” and whose “Double-Tongued Dictionary” is available at www.doubletongued.org. “While it is debated regularly,” he e-mails, “some linguists and lexicographers do think that sucks, as it is currently used, such as ‘Algebra sucks,’ without a direct object, is probably not derived from longer forms.” Obviously, other language scholars disagree and are free to send their always profound comments to one another on the American Dialect Society listserv because I must use my remaining space to deal with this question: Is there anything unduly suggestive or remotely lascivious about Bush’s “I’m about to crank this sucker up?”

Not to anyone with clean hands and a pure heart. Here is Harry Smith, paragon of media virtue, on the CBS “Early Show,” displaying a large, expensive toy named PlayStation 3: “We’re going to show you how this sucker works.” And here is Representative Phil Gingrey, Georgia Republican and a stalwart of the right, on a Democratic bill ordering Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices: “It’s a loss for our seniors; we need to kill this sucker dead.” And reaching back to 1969, John Denver’s rendition of the romantic lyrics “You dun stomped on my heart and mashed that sucker flat.”

Sol Steinmetz, member of Olbom (On Language’s Board of Octogenarian Mentors), is the voice of calm sagacity: “Sucker in this context is a slang term that uses the standard word sucker for any unspecified thing, and is synonymous with other terms like dojigger, bugger, gizmo and others for ‘a machine or contraption.’ ”

If the reader will move back, I will zip this column to my copy editor in New York as soon as I can find the right thingamabob, doohickey, whatchamacallit, whoozadingy or sucker to hit on this weird ergonomic keyboard.