Here is the first graf of the current New Yorker's opening "Comment," by Amy Davidson, called "Game Change":
By the time the contenders for Super Bowl XLVIII were set, two weekends ago, a hero and a villain had been chosen, too. The Denver Broncos’ quarterback, the aging, lovable Peyton Manning, had outplayed the Patriots to win the A.F.C. title. Meanwhile, in the N.F.C. championship game, Richard Sherman, a cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, became the designated bad guy. With thirty-one seconds left to play, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, had the ball on Seattle’s eighteen-yard line—the 49ers were losing by six points and needed a touchdown. He spotted Michael Crabtree, a wide receiver, and sent him the pass. Sherman twisted up in the air until he seemed almost in synch with the ball’s spiralling, then tipped the ball into the hands of another defender for an interception, and won the game.
The New Yorker is famous for its fastidious editing and fact-checking, but I'm beginning to think it is conducted mainly by "literary types" who care less than their countrymen about who wins football games. For isn't a lot of this just a little bit off? It's too quarterback-centric, for instance. Peyton Manning may have outplayed Tom Brady but he didn't outplay the Patriots. The 49ers, not their quarterback, had the ball on the Seattle 18-yard line before the play everyone's talking about. (Given the New Yorker's devotion to its somewhat idiosyncratic style sheet, I'm a little surprised it doesn't call the San Francisco team the Forty-Niners.) I don't think any football fan would ever say that the quarterback "sent" a pass toward a certain receiver. The last sentence makes it sound like Richard Sherman deliberately tipped the ball to a teammate. I'm pretty sure he was just happy to tip it and happier still that it turned out his teammate was right there to cradle it.
The rest of the article is interesting mainly for its discussion of another language point. After earning the epithet "thug" for his adrenalin-aided post-game rant to a sideline reporter, Sherman has expressed the opinion that "thug" is just a stand-in for the disgraced n-word. Davidson seems sympathetic, and I am, too. At the very least, "thug" is used in place of "criminal" when there is no evidence, other than personal appearance, of criminality. And what color are people who look like criminals even when not committing crimes?
I'm a little depressed by the evolution of "thug," for back in the day it was a perfectly good word--a near synonym for "henchman," but more poetic, because its heavy monosyllable has a whiff of the onomatopoeic. There's a lot of words like this. They used to have a specific meaning but now it seems they mean something more, or different, and are thus less sharp. I give you "ironic," which now often means nothing more than "coincidental," and "iconic," as in "Pete Seeger was an iconic sight at protests." Is the sound these rhyming words make so fun that people just started using them promiscuously?