The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, March 20, 2024

On Language: The word today is thug and thuggery. “A violent or aggressive person, esp. a criminal; a hoodlum,” the OED tells us. Fair enough. The use of the word goes back to the early 1800s in the United States. But it has enjoyed–I am using the word wryly–a renaissance as a dog whistle. Thug is now commonly used, in supposedly polite company, often by your average politician or police chief, as a substitute for the n-word. Let me explain to you my writing process here. I wrote these few lines based on what I have come to know from observation, from reporting around Flagler County, from listening to national politicians. I wanted to verify this conclusion, knowing that I easily could with the ease of a Google search. My search words: “thug dog whistle.” First result: “The Racially Charged Meaning Behind The Word ‘Thug’,” an NPR story from 2015. John McWhorter, the linguist, is soon quoted in the story: “Well, the truth is that thug today is a nominally polite way of using the N-word. Many people suspect it, and they are correct. When somebody talks about thugs ruining a place, it is almost impossible today that they are referring to somebody with blond hair. It is a sly way of saying there go those black people ruining things again. And so anybody who wonders whether thug is becoming the new N-word doesn’t need to. It’s most certainly is.” He was speaking around the time when Obama himself used the word to describe looters in Baltimore. “Yep, and that is because just like the N-word, we have another one of these strangely bifurcated words. Thug in the black community, for about the past 25 to 30 years, has also meant ruffian, but there is a tinge of affection. A thug in black people’s speech is somebody who is a ruffian but in being a ruffian is displaying a healthy sort of countercultural initiative, displaying a kind of resilience in the face of racism etc. Of course nobody puts it that way, but that’s the feeling. And so when black people say it, they don’t mean what white people mean, and that’s why I think Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama saying it means something different from the white housewife wherever who says it.” The origin of the word is fascinating: it originated with “Thuggee,” in India, which the OED describes as “A member of a society or cult of robbers and murderers in India known for strangling their victims… Thugs were known for winning the confidence of travellers, whom they would then murder, especially by strangulation, in a sudden surprise attack, before taking their belongings. They were suppressed under British rule in the 1830s and considered eliminated by the late 19th century. In an influential tradition in the 19th century, they were considered to be devotees of the goddess Kali, killing their victims in a ritually prescribed manner. However, many modern historians have questioned this, as well other aspects of historical accounts of Thugs and their practices.” The word, anyway, was adopted by the British during their occupation of India,, and they imported it to Britain–their own little souvenir dog whistle.

—P.T.

 

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Semiautomatic weapons on city streets threaten whole communities and they alarm the police. In some places, police feel so outgunned that they are reaching for heavier weapons of their own. Punks who fought with chains and knives seem like ”West Side Story” innocents compared with today’s teen-age gangsters with their Rambo guns: the Uzi carbine, the AR-15, the MAC-10 and the AKS, a semiautomatic version of the Soviet AK-47. A 1986 law banned manufacture for private sale of fully automatic machine guns, which fire repeatedly while the trigger is pressed. But no Federal law limits military assault rifles that are semiautomatic – requiring a trigger pull for each shot. It’s a flimsy distinction. Many semiautomatics can be made fully automatic with a screwdriver, even a paperclip. The National Rifle Association opposes any controls on such weapons, pointing out that their rapid firing mechanism resembles that of popular semiautomatic hunting rifles. But the issue of definition isn’t insurmountable. The overall design of weapons intended for military use – to kill humans at relatively short range – differs markedly from that of guns intended to kill animals at a distance. Federal officials prevented the importation of semiautomatic shotguns explicitly designed for ”crowd control” in South Africa on grounds that they were clearly inappropriate for hunting.

–From an editorial titled “Drug Thugs and Rambo Guns,” The New York Times, Aug. 1, 1988.

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