Social medi(a)ocre

Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell the difference.

There has been a burst of interest in the term "thug" and whether or not the term is racist – against African-Americans.

Everybody knows, you'd think, the term derives from the Thuggee, India's extinct cult of murderous robbers. I wanted to know why people suddenly would believe it applied to African-Americans, so I visited famed philologist Howard Bashford, who holds the esteemed Adirondack chair in linguistics at Crawford Notch University in New Hampshire.

"You've been watching 'thug,' too?" asked Bashford when I braced him on the matter. "It's rather a fascinating case involving elements of illiteracy, political correctness, folk-etymology, social media and willful stupidity – but, on those last two, I repeat myself."

I asked the distinguished pedagogue to expatiate, and he had me take a seat. He went to an oak file cabinet under his office's leaded glass windows, thumbed through its folders and extracted one of medium thickness. Then he plopped into the swivel chair behind his vintage walnut desk and opened the file.

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Bashford hummed to himself as he perused its contents, then pulled out a couple of pages and said, "Here we are. It seems thug's 'racist' designation stems almost entirely from an assertion by Seattle Seahawks' defensive back Richard Sherman. He called it an 'accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays.'

"Sherman made this declaration when some people called him a thug after he engaged in a strange, post-game tirade about what a great football player he was. That's all it took."

He reinserted the pages and began to close the file folder, but I said, "Excuse me, professor, but that's all it took to do what?"

Bashford answered condescendingly, "That's all it took to get the folk etymology ball rolling."

I must have looked confused, for the professor continued, "Mr. Sherman is an African-American. Among certain elements of American society, if an African-American asserts that a word is racist, the assertion is assumed to be true. Further, if an actual racist uses the term, that is considered probative. Let me give you another example."

Bashford shuffled through the file again, emerging with a newspaper clipping. He said, "Here's a column by a Florida newspaper columnist, writing about the death of a young African-American man. The victim shot by a white guy offended by loud 'thug music.'

"We can safely assume this was some species of rap, an art form that commonly idealizes thuggery. Nevertheless, it is primarily an African-American art form, so if a white fellow calls thug music 'thug music,' the logically challenged will call the term racist."

Bashford scanned the newsprint a bit more, then said, "Here's another example. The columnist notes that when the gunman was incarcerated, he wrote that the jail was 'full of blacks, and they all act like thugs.'

"Of course, one must wonder why a truly racist person would be so delicate as to demur on the use of the N-word. And one might reasonably assume some proportion of the fellows in the jail were violent criminals –  thugs in the classic sense."

"OK, professor," I said, "where do social media and stupidity enter the picture?"

"Ah!" he chuckled. "Now you repeat yourself. I have had some students tell me they used the word 'thug' on Facebook or some other time-waster, and they were excoriated by 'friends' for employing a 'racist term.' My students faced a kind of mass intimidation – bullying, if you will – by politically correct 'intellectuals.'

"Folk etymology used to move slowly. It would take decades for an improper usage to take hold. For example, 'unique' once meant, well, unique. With misuse over a long time – particularly by news readers and newspaper reporters – it has come to mean unusual or outstanding. Really sets my teeth on edge.

"'Unique' took a while, but today intentional idiots can spread ignorance through social media with the speed of light. By the way, I'm planning a little experiment. I'm having my students watch for the word 'odd.' When they see it, they will criticize it as racist. We'll so how long it takes for this to be widely accepted."

"But, professor," I said, "that would be truly stupid."

He replied, "Welcome to the world of social media."

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