Plaintive linguistic problem

The Online Etymology Dictionary informs me that both "to suck" and "to blow", when used to indicate the negative qualities of a situation, are VERY recent coinages (like, this century recent). 

If one wished to indicate this with a slang that sounded modern and colloquial to current readers, are there any pre-1750 coinages that anyone reading this knows?  I think I'll go poke around for a Shakespearean insult dictionary online.

Linguistics and reflexive prejudice

If you start paying attention to the age of your words you realize how much the existence of certain words at certain times is reciprocal with our expectations and prejudices.

For instance, I'm trying to pull seriously anachronistic words out of my writing.  And sometimes when you do that and try to replace them with something else, you realize that there is no possible replacement because the thing you assumed existed in that framework, didn't.

An example: the word "slum".  It's a word I take for granted, along with variants like "slumming it."  It's an 1800s word though.  Rookery isn't much older.

And as I poked through the online etymology dictionary and pulled out my copies of "Hubbub" and "London: A biography" and a few others, and looked up "poor" and so forth, I remembered why: 1600s London didn't yet have any hard-line division of neighborhoods into rich neighborhoods and poor (ignored) neighborhoods.  There were crummy neighborhoods (especially those defined by trades, etc), but within the city it tended to be more things like road frontage and lot size and the like, and rich people with nice houses might have crumbly nasty houses nearby.  There was the ghetto, for Jews, which was certainly a slum as we'd think of it now.  But the usage of ghetto for poor places where non-Jewish people live wasn't yet a common usage.  The rich of the 1600s didn't routinely live out of sight of poverty in the way of the rich of the 1800s.

This is all "as far as I can tell" of course, not real history.  But it's fascinating to me, because I realized I couldn't imagine a time when rich and poor people lived tooth by jowl.  The urban planning changes of the 1700s-1800s are burned into my brain, and the idea of major cities that are organized differently astonishes me.