I am (thank god) not in a position where I need to behave as a politician; and some things should be left to the philosophers and their various theories of meaning.
There is nothing simple about sorting out meaning and that is ok. The messiness is how we get to know each other. Denying the messiness is how we stay divided.
I used to view it as you do but some people let me know how they experienced the word.
If I call my team here at work, who report to me, âthugsâ, âslugsâ or anything else insulting, Iâm being a dick, unnecessarily
We can think Beilein is a good man and that he did a bad thing.
Doing this is worse in an environment filled with people with whom youâve evidently failed to build rapport who have already planted media stories behind your back.
The fact that Woj has this almost certainly means it was leaked by an agent - which is bad organizationally.
Didnât expect to be discussing linguistics today, but here ya go.
MCWHORTER: Well, the word originates in India as a word for roughly that. And because the British ran India for a good long time, the word jumped the rails from Indian languages to English, and thatâs the reason that we in America have used the word for a very long time. And until rather recently, it did mean what you might call a ruffian, but of course, things have changed.
BLOCK: Well, how have they changed?
MCWHORTER: Well, the truth is that thug today is a nominally polite way of using the N-word. Many people suspect it, and they are correct. When somebody talks about thugs ruining a place, it is almost impossible today that they are referring to somebody with blond hair. It is a sly way of saying there go those black people ruining things again. And so anybody who wonders whether thug is becoming the new N-word doesnât need to. Itâs most certainly is.
I live in the south. My experience is that people use the word thug as a not so thinly veiled code word to replace the n-word.
I canât imagine Beilein intending to use the word in that way. I believe he either meant âslugâ to describe Kevin Love walking around the court like a petulant child or he just didnât think about or intend the coded use of the word.
Not a good look for Beilein, but I honestly donât believe the guy we grew to know for over a decade here had any intent to offend or be hurtful with his choice of words. It was just an unfortunate mistake.
Also, Dan Gilbert is as cheap as it gets. Heâs not going to fire Beilein unless he has to and pay two coaches during a rebuild. They only let Larry Drew go because his contract was expired and they werenât on the hook to pay him anymore. Theyâll dump Love and Thompson and let Beilein be the developer they hoped he would be.
The necessary messiness of âestablishingâ meaning is the very thing that never changes and never will.
What a mess. Beilein deserves better, and I can sure imagine him having that slip of the tongue, but I can also imagine that his career wonât be defined by this.
I believe JB is a great coach and a great man who has made a series of strange decisions/mistakes in the last calendar year that will dramatically alter the perception of the twilight of his career.
FWIW after that infamous Cincinnati-Xavier brawl ended the game early, one of the players involved (who was allowed in the presser because???) implied that âthugâ is a âworseâ (in terms of level of derogatory) thing to say than even something like gangstas.
We got a whole bunch of gangsters in our locker room. Not thugs, but tough guys on the court. We went out there and zipped em up at the end of the game. Thatâs our motto â zip âem up,â Holloway explained.
Two things: that might be one of the funniest pressers Iâve seen and if arguing over the racial connotations of the word âthugâ isnât peak umhoops.com then I donât know what is 
Huh? Everything is up for debate!
Iâm going to debate you about whether everything is up for debate or not.
That the word has racial connotations is a fact.
That some people didnât know or understand that fact is also be true, I suppose.
The debatability is debatable.
Oof, I donât buy the âslugsâ excuse and think it makes it way worse. More importantly, no way the players buy it.
How donât you buy it? The word âthugâ makes almost no sense given the context. âSlugâ 100% does given that they were playing, ya know, sluggish for the past several games. You think Beilein is the type of person to flat out lie about this?
I think itâs pretty interesting that completely neutral places like Reddit are 95% like âyeah, itâs pretty clear he meant slugs.â Thatâs not to say the players arenât gonna be mad because they probably donât know Beileinâs 40 year career of being a great guy with no controversy, but I feel like some people here just have this weird vendetta and want to paint Beilein in a bad light because he left.
I have zero vendetta against Belein and was very happy for him when left. And calling someone a âthugâ for playing lazy 100% makes sense (itâs wrong, but itâs logical).
No, it really doesnât.
No. It is a fact that what you are saying is not true. Words themselves do not have specific connotations attached to them.