Suddenly “Thug” is the new racial epithet we aren’t allowed to use? I find this absurd. I have never, in all my years, heard it used as anything more than a “brute” or “ruffian.” In fact, for me the first mental image that comes to mind are white mobster enforcer types, about as far from specifically black as you can get; think low level guys in Goodfellas.
(Also heard a lengthy discussion of “Thug as new N-Word” on NPR this afternoon.
I really think that this is just a case of not liking any pejorative being used in reference to the predominantly black rioters. But please, just because you don’t like the rioters being called names, don’t now take this perfectly good word and try to reshape it as something it’s not.
I would argue the most common usage is, and has been for years, jack-booted thugs, specifically in reference to government LEOs
Am I really that out of touch?
(Interestingly, I don’t think of thug as the right word for the rioters, because I think of thug as more of a profession or general manner of behavior, while the rioters are probably mostly opportunists)
I agree, OP. I’m also not real fond of this sudden re-branding it from “rioting” and “looting” and “all-round thuggery” to “this is what a people do when they feel they’re not being heard, just like some Bostonians did when throwing tea into the sea and calling it a Party.”
Nahhh…the “rioting” and “looting” and “all-round thuggery” involving tea during the movement for American Independence was symbolic. What’s the symbolism of running down the street with a 60" flat-screen?
That’s the thing about language. If people start using a word as a racial slur, it becomes a racial slur, irrespective of its previous meanings or connotations.
So a premium consumer good like tea (in the eighteenth century) can have a symbolic sigfnificance, but a premium consumer good like a big television (in the twenty-first) can’t?
In a materialistic consumer society, a large part of social exclusion and alienation consists in denial of access to consumer goods. I would have thought that the symbolism of looting was obvious.
So, “taxation without representation” IS the same thing as “You have this and I want this so I’m taking it, all in the name of a cop killed another black guy”?!?
Hmmmm…I must have fallen asleep for a few (several hundred) minutes in my Sociology classes, which has interfered with my ability to connect the dots as cleanly, concisely, and quickly as you’ve been able to.
Very true, and I accept that readily. But I think that I’m hearing ex post facto assignation of meaning. I’d like to know what evidence there is for such meaning prior to this “accusation” right here.
If you call me stupid and I declare that as an epithet, it doesn’t make it so.
Unfortunately “thug” has been migrating in the direction of “scary black man” for several years now (I can attest that it isn’t a recent development). I really don’t like having yet another perfectly good word ruined by bigots, but there are apparently enough people who use “thug” in a racially-loaded manner that we can’t ignore the connotations anymore.
Yeah, I have to say that I’m not on board with this revision of the language. It’s origin is with a specific set of criminals, and generally is used to mean “violent criminal” in modern usage. If you don’t want the term to apply to you, don’t be a violent criminal.
It doesn’t always take, however. Remember when Richard Dawkins tried to get people to use “bright” as a new word for atheist? Nice try (I guess) but it bounced.
I’d like to see this one bounce also. Thugs are brawny stupid violent villains, of any ethnos. Oddjob in Goldfinger was a thug, as was Bane in Batman.
Yeah, it’s pretty rare for an individual to be able to direct language change like that. Really, the only time I can think of where someone pulled it off was Dan Savage.
But yes, “thug” should refer to brawny, brainless villains. And not peaceful, black protesters.
Its origin is in India. Thuggees were followers of Kali who killed people as sacrifices to their Goddess. And being as a man’s got to eat, they stole the possessions from the people they killed.
And the only way to retain the meaning of a word is to continue using in its original sense, regardless of whether some bigots are using it in some other way. Sure, when one side or the other has solid numerical advantage, then the war is over, but up until that point the word is fair game. The only way to definitely lose a word’s meaning is to grant exclusive access to the idiots.
How did you come up with that? There’s no indication that thugs were seen as distinct in appearance from other Indians. In fact, one of their supposed tactics was to infiltrate a group of travelers by appearing to be innocent travelers themselves - and then at a signal all the thugs would reveal themselves and kill everyone in the group who wasn’t a thug.
The premium consumer good in 1773 was not taken home by the protesters; they dumped it in the harbor. If the protesters today were destroying the TV sets, I might be more amenable to your point. By stealing them, they invite the inference that more base motives are in play.
And I lack the ability to connect the dots cleanly, concisely and quickly between “taxation without representation” and “you have this tea and I want it so I’m taking it” as you seem to do.
I didn’t say that the two protest were “the same thing”. I said that theft of consumer goods has a fairly obvious symbolic significance in a protest by a disadvantaged minority objecting to their alienation within a materialist, consumerist society. If you couldn’t even understand that that’s what I was saying, never mind whether you agree with it, then, yes, you must have slept quite a bit through sociology.
Well, we don’t actually know what is becoming of the TV sets, do we? But, yes, base motives may well be in play. So what? People who object to paying taxes may also have base motives (in fact, they may have exactly the same base motive as those who steal televisions. The baseness of the actor’s motive is not at all inconsistent with the suggestion that the action has a symbolic significance.
Of course, the reason they threw it in the harbour in the first place was so they could sell and smuggle their own overpriced (well, more expensive) tea instead rather than letting people buy cheapo surplus tea from the EIC.
The tea-chuckers won the Revolutionary War, allowing Americans to forever define their motives as pure and principled objections to unreasonable and tyrannical power.
Of course, as even many of the revolutionaries themselves recognized, had they lost they would have simply been traitors, and treated accordingly.
As for the use of the word “thug,” it seems that the word has come to mean, for some commentators, little more than “a black man who does something that i don’t agree with.” While it might be true that some black men who are referred to as thugs really are thugs, the term seems to be used far more broadly (about black men) than is warranted by their actual behavior. It seems that the term has become a sort of a priori assumption about one particular group of people, rather than an actual description of a particular set of attitudes and actions.
I’m not sure what the response should be to this development. It seems to me that we might have two main options. One would be to try and reclaim “thug” in its original sense, as a word that described particular attitudes and actions, rather than skin color. Doing this might force people who seem to be using it as a racial code-word to reconsider their usage. This would be my preference.
The other option, if that doesn’t work, might be simply for reasonable people to abandon the word altogether, and leave it to the bigots, whereupon it really will end up as nothing more than a racial slur, and will thus allow us to clearly identify the bigots by their use of the word.
