I thought I was the only one who did 'useless info' posts.

Slate takes it to a new art form [and the only time you will ever see Ann Coulter mentioned on here]:

'Oddly, this concision seems to work against sucks. More than any saucy origin-story, I actually think what's holding sucks down is our long-held (and unexamined) prejudice against intransitive verbs as a means of expressing merit (or lack thereof, in this case).

Consider: We have countless options when it comes to expressing our basic distaste for Ann Coulter.

We can use a predicate adjective ("Ann Coulter is awful").

We can opt for an attributive adjective and a noun ("Ann Coulter is an awful person").

We can let the verb do more work ("Ann Coulter disgusts me").

We can find any number of more complex ways to express this very simple and important idea.

English speakers have traditionally turned to our tongue's Germanic side when we seek to be direct. (Some Germanic words: run, eat, beat, and yes, suck.)

But we turn to our French romance roots when we're looking for a little more formality. (Romance words: saunter, devour, chastise.) It's not precisely the same thing, but a similar duality has come to affect our sentence constructions.

We get short and direct when we're being casual, but we tend to add layers and buffers when we're reaching for a formal air. Perhaps the X sucks/stinks/rocks/rules formulation is just so blunt it strikes us as unseemly.'