‘Don’t they speak English?’ asked my husband, tossing over a copy of the Daily Mail as though it were my fault. The headline read: ‘Missing in action’. It referred to Dan Jarvis disappearing from view in his new job as Defence Secretary.
The headline writers should know that, militarily, those missing in action are presumed dead. The Mail meant Awol – absent without leave.
I mentioned this ignorant error here in 2022. In 2024 I remarked how odd it was that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, should say about mob violence outside a migrant hotel near Rotherham: ‘It is organised, violent thuggery.’ Now Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is at it. Asked whether Belfast had seen racist riots, he said: ‘If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.’
Thug has a controverted origin. In 1839 Confessions of a Thuggee by Philip Meadows Taylor, an officer in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, was published with great success. His publisher Richard Bentley told him that Queen Victoria had commanded the proof sheets ‘as they were revised, to be sent to her’. I wonder.
The accepted account described thugs as professional hereditary murderers who worshipped the goddess Kali and preyed on travellers. They would attack their victims with a noose of twisted silk. But the OED warns that ‘many modern historians have questioned this’. A summary of developments was given by Dr Jonathan Perris in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2025.
Thuggee or thuggery metamorphosed in the London of the 1850s into a criminal vogue for garrotting as a means of robbery. In 1857, Nathaniel Hawthorne reported that clay figurines depicting Indian thugs were removed from display in the British Museum lest they encourage thuggery in London. To the Cabinet, thuggery is still alive.
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