Slang of the Week
A.C. Kemp
June 12, 2008

goon (noun)
1. a stupid person 2. a thug

Example:
Jimmy thought he’d started a new life through the Witness Protection Program until he came home one day to find a couple of goons with baseball bats in his kitchen.

Celebrity quote:
"Car full of goons and everybody certified
And if you froze up last time you can't ride
It's going down tonight 'cause these goons out lurkin'"
— Rapper Plies on the song Goons Lurkin'

This week's word is yet another example of how bad things become good in slang. In 1987, Michael Jackson released his album Bad, which really meant good. Since then, we've heard teenagers praise things with words like ill, sick and even nasty.

In its earliest incarnations, a goon was a fool. In the iconic 1950s family show, Leave it to Beaver, for example, Eddie Haskell explains to his friend Wally, "...if you can make the other guy feel like a goon first, then you don't feel like so much of a goon." (The same decade ushered in a popular British radio comedy called The Goon Show.)

The word first appeared in the 1920s with that meaning, and it wasn't until the 1930s that it began to describe thugs. Those goons were usually men hired to threaten and beat union members on strike. However, it can be use more generally, and often shows up in stories about gangsters who send goons out to collect debts through intimidation and/or injury.

But like ill, sick and nasty, this word has begun to experience a linguistic flip... read more

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