The origin of blow = suck, be bad/unpleasant recently came up in comments to this ELL question.
I'd always assumed it was a standard slang "meaning reversal" from suck. But a few minutes on Google failed to confirm this for me, and in that ELL link, Feral Oink credibly suggests it's from blow chunks - to be very bad, inadequate, unpleasant, or miserable; to thoroughly suck.
Does anyone know when and why the usage arose?
The OED’s definition 15f of suck is ‘To be contemptible or disgusting’. The earliest citation is from 1971. The OED relates it to the noun suck, Canadian slang for ‘A worthless or contemptible person’. This in turn may or may not (the OED doesn’t say) have something to do with ‘sucks’ used, particularly by children, as an expression of contempt.
The OED also has an entry for blow as a draft addition in 2009, where the definition is given as ‘To be contemptible, tiresome, or disagreeable’. It is described as North American slang, and there is a cross reference to suck. The earliest citation predates the earliest citation for derogatory suck by 11 years.
Did some research on this based on information in the comments.
There appear to be two schools of thought on the etymology of the adjective "sucks".
The first is that it comes from relative innocuous roots (one possible example: the phrase "suck eggs", which can be found in the works of Mark Twain).
The second is that the roots of the term are in its older meaning of fellatio. For example, Etymology Online's entry says:
Meaning "do fellatio" is first recorded 1928. Slang sense of "be contemptible" first attested 1971 (the underlying notion is of fellatio).
This better matches the traditional intent of the word (as a longtime user from at least the mid-70's), as well as the variants often heard in the wild (which invariably are elaborations on the theme of oral sex). Still, it would be tough to say which, if indeed either, interpretation is correct.
As for "blows", I couldn't find much. Supposedly it originates from the USA in the 80's. I did happen to be a big user of the word myself, as a teenager in the early 80's. I know my peers (in the middle of the USA) used it as a nearly exact synonym for "sucks", for those occasions when that word had been used enough that its impact may not quite be as hefty as desired. Really its best to alternate.
As a near synonym, it had the same vulgar connotations to us as "sucks". However, it is true that one could tack on "monkey chunks" to transform it into a slightly different vulgarity (making it a bit more versatile, and thus preferred by some of my fellow connoisseurs of angst). I can't for sure say if the "monkey chunks" predated the lone sense of "blows", so exactly which of the two bodily actions it was originally intended to imply can perhaps only be discerned through further research. Possibly a good dissertation for someone in the offing here.
I have a 1983 script from an Off-Broadway revue which includes the line "our foreign policy blows dead rats."
This suggests that blows and sucks are parallel derivations (in their sexual meaning).
This is not related to "blow chunks", which refers to vomiting.
I have always understood "this blows" to be a shortened form of "this blows chunks", or, in other words, "this causes me to vomit". That's what those chunks are -- your stomach contents on display. Although nobody actually vomits.
It has the same general meaning of "this sucks", that is, something which is bad or unacceptable. But "sucks" in this usage has reference to certain obscene conduct and not to the opposite of vomiting.
