To Thug or Not to Thug
Eileen F. Toplansky / American Thinker
As I expected, a number of the college students I instruct took exception to the use of the word thug as applied to the individuals who created mayhem and madness in Baltimore last week. That “their” president used the term was of little import to these students.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word thug is “[o]ne of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India, who strangled their victims; phansigar.” In “1810 in Hist. & Pract. Thugs (1837) xxi. 329 [one reads] . . . that ‘Thugs’, [who robbed and murdered] infested the . . . the Upper Provinces.” In “1839 T. De Quincey 2nd Paper on Murder in Blackwood’s Mag. Nov. 668/2 [wrote] [a]t length came the toast of the day – Thugdom in all its branches.”
By the late nineteenth century, the term took on the more modern connotation so that in “1883 G. W. Cable in Cent. Mag. June 230/1 maintained that “[a] few ‘thugs’ terrorized the city with… beating, stabbing, and shooting.” The word thug took on a new twist when in “1895 J. Burns in Westm. Gaz. 17 Jan. 2/1 maintained that “[t]hey even engage ‘knockers-out’, who… belabour and disable voters as they are entering the booths… They are called ‘election Thugs.’”
In 1937 the term was associated directly with gangs as the Sun (Baltimore) 6 May 7/2 notes [w]hen… “thugging in Harlan county… Merle Middleton was the chief of the gang.” By “1967 S. Faessler in the Atlantic Monthly Apr. 103/2 [wrote that] [t]he old man ducked for cover… but not my father. Unarmed he stood up to the thugs, and was cracked over the head for it.”
Yet we are told in politically correct America “that… ‘uprising,’ ‘insurrection,’ or one-man ‘revolution’” and not ‘riot’ more accurately characterize the brick-braining of cops, joyriding of stolen cars through intersection bonfires, and the looting of local businesses of such basic household necessities as Wonder Bread, Charmin, and Night Train.” Thus, “one should not call the insurrection a ‘riot’ and don’t call the rioters, er, insurrectionists “thugs.”
Read more at AT:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/to_thug_or_not_to_thug.html#ixzz3ZSrcZA89
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