On Jul 15, 2005, at 12:45 AM, Raymond Horton wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Hmm, OK. Time for some slang etymology here.
...
Maybe fifteen years ago I first heard "blows" meaning bad. It was
around the time that the expression "blowing chunks" (for throwing
up) gained popularity, and often the two were interchanged. "That
team blows chunks!" would be freely interchanged with "That team
blows!" Of course, now it just means "bad." Note there is no
connection with "sucks" that is immediately apparent to today's
generation, just as there is no connection between "phat" and "fat".
Sorry, but a quick check of Internet slang dictionaries do not agree
with you that the slang "blow" is only short for "blow chunks." It
seems to be as a verb most often connected with oral sex,
That meaning showed up LONG before the "That blows!" meaning, and the
jazz meaning appears long before both. If "You suck!" and "You blow!"
meant the same thing when the first one showed up, why wasn't the
second used? There was at least a 15 year delay before it did; plenty
of time to change generations.
My point was that the meaning of "That blows" as "That is no good"
showed up divorced from "blow's" most frequent oral sex connotation,
and is now divorced from its throwing up connotation, too.
as a noun with cocaine. Only farther down the lists do the chunkier
definitions appear.
Showing up farther down the list doesn't mean much, I think. Context
determines meaning.
Christopher
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