A few pages into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus – not yet seven years old, if we can extrapolate from Joyce's own life – gives grave consideration to a word he has just heard from the mouth of one of his schoolfellows:

From the point of view of modern linguistics, Stephen's theorizing is obviously false: ugliness does not inhere in the sounds of a language, and although a culture can imbue certain sounds with negative associations, none of the three common phonemes in ‘suck’ is so affected. (Compare the same sounds in words like ‘luck’, ‘sup’, ‘musk’, and ‘success’.) Nor would water going down a drain sound, in objective, measurable terms, like the word ‘suck’ uttered in any normal human voice or accent.