The hardest thing in (the) English language

English is not my native language, but I’ve become pretty good at it. This one thing though…

Check out this quote by Eminem (the song “The Ringer” from the album Kamikaze):

“Can get a mouthful of flesh
And, yes, I mean eating a penis”

So it’s a penis here. Note the article. Eminem is not talking about some specific penis, but rather a non-specific, non-particular penis.

On the other hand, I also see the expression “suck cock” a lot.

No “a” before cock here.

So in the second example, is “cock” a kind of an all-encompassing omnipresent penis? So like many cocks? Cocks of different individuals but referred to collectively as a single cock? But this cock is still not very specific, so how is this cock different from the cock Eminem has in mind? Or is it possible that Eminem’s English is just bad? Maybe his English teacher who wanted to flunk him in Junior High was right?

It’s very confusing. Add on top of that your foreign accent, and you can appear really uneducated and impolite. They don’t teach this at school or in textbooks.

I’m sorry (I’m not) for starting my note with this NSFW example. I hope my boss is not reading this. But the struggle is real! You see in Russian, my native language, it’s simply “suck cock”. We don’t have articles.