The History of ‘Thug’
Last night, as Baltimore erupted with riots and violence and anger, the city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, took to Twitter to share her thoughts on the events sweeping the city. The mayor talked about “the evil we see tonight.” She promised that “we will do whatever it takes” to stop the destruction and restore “the will of good.” Because “too many people,” she said, “have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down.”
“Thugs.” “Thug.” The derision here—dismissive, indignant, willfully unsympathetic—is implied in the sound of the word itself. Spoken aloud, requires its utterer first to sneer (the lisp of the ) and then to gape (the) and then to choke the air (that final, glottal ). Even if you hadn’t heard the word before, even if you had no idea what it meant, you would probably guess that it is an epithet. may have undergone the classic cycle of de- and re- and re-re-appropriation—the lyric-annotation site Genius
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