Asking someone why they chose a particular phrasing is not a leading question. A leading question is one that suggests its own answer. I was asking because I thought the language sounded off, and I wanted to hear why he chose it. More broadly the goal was to get people to think about their language use. I believe recursive prophet when he says he doesn't believe in the biological reality of race.
You were a bit more specific about the implications of your question, a few pages ago:
You choice of syntax makes me think you were specifically talking about people who talk in African-American English. References to the "vernacular" of "street thugs" are also common among people disparaging racial and ethnic minorities.
As far as I've been able to tell, contrary to Foolmewunz's claims and despite his further claim that any doubt would be silly, "street thugs" is not a common synonym for "gangsta" and is not a very common phrase at all. Besides self-selected proper names, it has no meaning other than the combination of its two words: violence-prone people who are encountered on a street. There is no special definition for the phrase in any online dictionary that I can find, not even Urban Dictionary which is very profligate and up-to-date with phrases and neologisms.
The first two Google links for the phrase are, nonetheless, to Urban Dictionary (those links go to phrases and definitions in the UD that include one or the other word), and the third is for a race horse by that name. (Note: the kind of race where horses try to run faster than other horses, so please refrain from accusations of problematic language there.) The total number of hits for the phrase is about 400,000, which is consistent with it being used from time to time just as "street dog" and "street cat" (over 1 million hits each) are used primarily to describe creatures of the
canis and
felis varieties that are encountered in the street. For another comparison, the phrase "thug life" -- a phrase that
was adopted by ethnic minorities and does have a meaning distinct from the concatenation of its two words -- gets 7.1 million hits.
Now, Foolmewunz's point does have some validity, if applied not to the phrase "street thug" but to the single word "thug" itself. The word is several hundred years old, and originated in India; my sympathy, however, for the Indian victims of this "appropriation" is more than a little tempered by the fact that they were organized cultists practicing cold-blooded murder.
Nonetheless, it is true that in recent decades, in the U.S., some cultures such as the rap music world have adopted the term, as evidenced by (among many other things) the number of Google results for "thug life." That hardly nullifies hundreds of years of more general uses of the word, but it is out there.
Because of this, I'm inclined to forgive qwints for reading the phrase "street thugs" and immediately thinking it was a reference to black people.
However, I have not seen any evidence for the claimed use of the word thug, or phrases containing that word, as a code to secretly signal fellow racists. That claim, furthermore, flirts with being unfalsifiable, if this lack of evidence ends up being offered as evidence of how insidiously secret the alleged dog-whistle code is.
Respectfully,
Myriad
