Comments on: Bridgegate Chickens Come Home To Roost: Waiting For Other Shoe To Drop

By: Obstreperous Applesauce

Obstreperous Applesauce — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 15:11:58 +0000

‘thugitude’
Heh!

By all accounts the thugees were a brutal, murderous cult, so I’m not sure the term isn’t legit. Anyway I’m a little squeamish about handing over control of perfectly good words to nut jobs. At this point ‘Mexican’ is practically a dog whistle to the right. So do we demand that Mexico now change its name?

SteveP,
New Jersey culture (and indeed much of the New York metro area) has been steeped in the mafia. Christie may represent an improvement on the days of Anthony Imperiale sitting in his garage and busting peoples’ knuckles with a ball peen hammer, but his support of Trump is both revealing and troubling, IMO.

By: SteveP

SteveP — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 13:48:52 +0000

Christie’s thug nature is complicated. His obsession with power is thug like. His lack of empathy for his victims is thug like. His bullying nature is thug like. But his long time obsession with, understanding of, and ability to control the levers of power speaks to a higher level of thugitude. There may be another good word to describe this creepy schemer, but it escapes me. Some word to describe a thug who is able to continually and successfully flaunt the conventions of civility and accomplish, at a podium, on a national stage, what a more conventional thug does in a back alley, with a gun or a black jack.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 13:36:17 +0000

Raucous and Craig are both correct. However, the right wing dog whistle function of the word is questionable. When that first became a thing, I saw a lot of people who don’t know much about words triggering all over the term and very few right wing whistle blowers blowing the whistles, so I reject the whistle blowing notion.

As a user of words I tend to be initially resistant to proscriptions, unless a very good argument is made. And, here’s the thing, no good argument about proscriptive word use has ever been, or eve will be, made on Twitter. It has to be done in a more solid and thoughtful context or it doesn’t count.

Raucous, if you know of a good course, I’d love to see the links.

Regarding the British Empire sources, that is a legit argument for a racist meaning. However, I feel that it would be necessary to earmark all of the South Asian, West Asian, and African British word borrowings that follow this pattern and not just pick out one. That may have an unwieldy effect on language. Certainly, there are a few words that currently and locally have racist connotations but that are used in non-racist speech that should be purged (like “kaffir”), but I’m not sure we are ready to knock off the assassins and others.

By: Craig Thomas

Craig Thomas — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 02:15:32 +0000

“Thug” is a Hindu word that the British Empire added to our language during their organisation of India, which involved trying to eradicate the Kali worshippers, the thuggees, and other symptoms of chaos.
Since then, the word “thug” has evolved in implication of violence.

By: Raucous Indignation

Raucous Indignation — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 18:37:29 +0000

“Thug” is most certainly a racist term, a dog whistle for the Right. In the same way “urban” is used in a pejorative context.

By: Obstreperous Applesauce

Obstreperous Applesauce — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 02:37:41 +0000

BTW, speaking of alternate colloquial definitions, that’s ‘goons’ not ‘GOONs’ (Guardians Of the Ogalala Nation)…

By: Buddha Buck

Buddha Buck — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 02:09:07 +0000

Anyone who carefully reads Edward Gorey’s “Gashleycrumb Tinies” should know what a thug is.

But I do see yellow cords on the wall behind Christie in the picture of him with Trump. If there ever was an opportunity for Christie to prove he was a thug…

By: Obstreperous Applesauce

Obstreperous Applesauce — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 01:44:11 +0000

Re: “Thug”. Some prefer the term “goon”.
Two points.
1. Joisey
2. Roy Cohn