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Word: thugs (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
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Usage:

George lives in a world where time is meaningless and it's possible to go months without being touched by anyone but a thug. Lack of sleep, food or conversation breeds confusion and depression. He feels himself slipping but struggles to remember what he once had and to figure out how to get it back. He rarely drinks alcohol and keeps his light brown corduroy pants and red- checked shirt meticulously clean. Underneath, he wears two other shirts to fight off the cold, and he sleeps with his large hands buried deep within his coat pockets amid old sandwiches...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Slow Descent into Hell | 2/2/1987 | See Source »

...really up to the task. In a profile of a well- known woman who insists that she has lived several times before, one journalese speaker came up with this deft line: "More than most people on this earth, she has found spiritual answers." In crime journalese, the top thug in any urban area is always referred to as a "reputed Mafia chieftain" and generally depicted as an untutored but charismatic leader of a successful business operation. The chieftain's apprentice thugs are his "associates." This sort of coverage reflects the automatic respect and dignity accorded crime figures who know where...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Essay: Journalese: a Ground-Breaking Study | 9/1/1986 | See Source »

...soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next: he is a movie warrior, he is a TV cartoon character, he is a plastic doll, he is a music-video creature and now, in candy racks all over America, he is chewing gum--Rambo black flak, jagged...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Pop Goes the Culture | 6/16/1986 | See Source »

Last week, I was assaulted on Winthrop Street in Harvard Square by Cambridge's toughest thug (by reputation): John Harvard himself. This incident left me minus my wallet and feeling vengeful. The story thus far: Friday night I parked at 67 Winthrop Street. Approaching the open spot I spied No Parking signs, but in the half-block between an alley and Kennedy Street, I inspected the posts carefully, and the coast looked clear. No signs, right or left, (This might have made me pause, I admit.) Fifteen minutes later my car was gone. The Cambridge police offered the (wrong) number...

Author: NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED | Title: Towing | 3/11/1986 | See Source »

...sound and horror of authenticity, The Godfather minus the glamour. There is no rich, family feeling here, no accretion of loyalties and vendettas. There is only the nostalgia of a successful sociopath for a lawless past. "Truckloads of swag. Fur coats, televisions, clothes--all for the asking," the thug recalls. "When I was broke I just went out and robbed some more. We ran everything. We paid the lawyers. We paid the cops. Everybody had their hands out. We walked out laughing. We had the best of everything...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Wrong Lane Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi | 3/3/1986 | See Source »

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