It actually comes from the Hindi word thuggee, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.” Thugs stole and murdered in India for more than five hundred years. The word didn’t catch on in America until Mark Twain wrote about them in the 1800s, in work that colored the word with the connotation of a gangster. Back then, white people had American thugism on straight lock. (Remember, black people were still enslaved or, in other words, they didn’t possess the freedom to even be thugs.)
