the.com/sucker
Someone who paid full price for what trust should've gotten free.
means A person who's easily fooled or cheated, especially one taken in by a scam or a sales pitch — or, informally, someone with a soft spot for a particular thing (a sucker for sad movies).
from From the verb 'suck.' Literally a sucker was a nursing baby animal or a sucking organ (like an octopus's sucker, or the root-shoot a tree sends up). The slang sense for a gullible person grew out of that infant image — someone still at the helpless, milk-drinking, easily-led stage of life, ripe for a con. American carnival and confidence-trick slang locked in the 'easy mark' meaning by the 19th century, and it's stuck ever since.
- origin
- from fish and babies, both suck instinctively
- P.T. Barnum
- never actually said one is born every minute
- candy sense
- lollipop named for the sucking motion, 1920s
- con artist term
- the mark who believes the pitch twice