Your dictionary reports: "goon [etymology] – a thug hired to intimidate or harm opponents, particulary as a strikebreaker; also, a stupid or oafish person [from the Popeye comics?]"
No, from Hindi and Urdu, where it means a thug (another word from Hindi and Urdu). Ref. the Dictionary of Indian English (www.vsubhash.com) "goonda: n. [Hindi] member of a crime gang; hired muscle; thug; troublemaker." I imagine that the same definition is provided in Sir Henry Yule's definitive 'Hobson Jobson.'
Hi turban1, Welcome to wordcraft. I remember the goons as the folks with funny noses that raised Popeye. They can't be all bad. As for Thug, I recall that they were a people of the central Asian area and were pretty damn unpleasent.
1921 F. L. ALLEN in Harper's Mag. Dec. 121/1 (title) The Goon and his Style. Ibid. 121/2 A goon is a person with a heavy touch as distinguished from a jigger, who has a light touch. While jiggers look on life with a genial eye, goons take a more stolid and literal view. 1938 Life 14 Nov. 6/3 The word ‘Goon’ was first popularized by college students who used it to mean any stupid person. Labor union lingo has given it a second meaning: a tough or thug. Rival unions and factions speak of another's ‘Goon Squads’. 1938 R. CHANDLER Trouble is my Business (1950) 80 Some goon here plays chess. You? 1940 R. STOUT Over My Dead Body iv. 57 You may be a couple of goons... But I'm asking you a damn straight question. 1942 D. POWELL Time to be Born (1943) vii. 175 You sit there gawping at him like some little goon. 1945 PARTRIDGE Dict. R.A.F. Slang 30 Goon, a fool, very stupid fellow; a gaper. 1951 ‘J. WYNDHAM’ Day of Triffids viii. 154 The goon started to argue. 1957 R. M. WARDLE Oliver Goldsmith i. 3 It was Goldsmith's misfortune that he was a jigger fallen among goons. Ibid. 5 William Cooke was a goon. Apparently it never entered his head that a man - especially an Irishman - might have preferred, for the joke's sake, to use a word which didn't make sense. 1959 S. CLARK Puma's Claw xii. 135 There, you goon. You'll bump into them if you don't watch out.
The third definition was interesting: "3. A nickname given by British and U.S. prisoners of war to their German guards in the war of 1939-45. Also transf. So goon-up!, a warning cry."
The links to the archived discussions don't work for me, either. I tried using Opera at home. Since I know wordcrafter creates the pages in Word and then exports them to Word's "version" of HTML I also tried with IE from work - still no luck.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Ah! I tried with IE7 from home and when the page loaded I got a message that it wanted to install an ActiveX object 'ietag.dll', and did I want to run it? I said yes and now the links work. Why Word needs a special control installed to make somethins as basic to HTML as links work is beyond me. Way to make things accessible, Microsoft!
EDIT: Hah! Even after jumping through those hoops I get a 404 after clicking on 'goon' in the dictionary. Clicking at random on other words gives about a 50-50 split between 'found' and 'not found' pages.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Ah, I don't think it's the HTML, but that some of the files were not uploaded. When I click on some of the links, they work with Firefox. (Looking at the HTML that Word generates is dizzy-making.)
