But nevertheless, thug is an interesting word, and to the extent that we need to be able to hear it as more than some antique, static, dictionary definition, then I think that that's part of the process of healing as well. Black people saying thug is not like white people saying thug.
That's one sick thug, yo
1) crazy, cool, insane
2) what one is on a test day
1) man, that trick was sick yo
2) i played sick on my big bio test day
Many years ago, during the Age of Puberty, I asked my 10th grade English teacher what
(sic) meant and he didn't know, implying that I should have looked it up. Other than that, he was the only openly gay teacher I had, taught me how to read Melville at multiple interpretive levels, assigned my first 40-page research paper and gave me an appreciation for comparative literature in our 12th grade class on James Joyce. Neither were
Dead Poets Society classes although he actually did stand on top of his desk once, probably because he was bored with teaching us.
Much of what I write does require that sense of having to look stuff up if only because of perhaps elitism, laziness, being in college too long, or some other pathology and thank goodness for the Internet, since so much of context is dependent on managing that kind of information.
Yesterday's NPR report on the use of the word "thug", as well as the Atlantic article, seemed to remind me of that problem, where archaic etymological notions of Thuggees and thuggery are conjoined with the double coding of the term as a proxy for racist epithets. It may be in fact that everyone is right - that it is about race, perhaps not the originary one, but it is about enmity in its utterance and it is never neutral or race-free, just as the discourse problems of correct questions and answers are revelatory for both the questioner/questioned or thugger(sic) and thuggee.
In her book The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (2002), Martine van Wœrkens suggests that evidence for the existence of a Thuggee cult in the 19th century was in part the product of "colonial imaginings"—British fear of the little-known interior of India and limited understanding of the religious and social practices of its inhabitants...
Dash rejects the colonial emphasis on the religious motivation for robbing, but instead asserts that monetary gain was the main motivation for Thuggee and that men sometimes became Thugs due to extreme poverty.
Usage notes
The word sic may be used in brackets to show that an uncommon or archaic usage is reported faithfully: for instance, quoting the U.S. Constitution:
The House of Representatives shall chuse [sic] their Speaker ...
It may also be used to highlight a perceived error, sometimes for the purpose of ridicule, as in this example from The Times:
Warehouse has been around for 30 years and has 263 stores, suggesting a large fan base. The chain sums up its appeal thus: "styley [sic], confident, sexy, glamorous, edgy, clean and individual, with it's [sic] finger on the fashion pulse."
Since it is not an abbreviation, it does not require a following period.
NSFW