Goon

This curious word, largely of American provenance, is a unique instance of an invented term becoming popular and developing a wide range of critical senses. It was coined by Frederick Lewis Allen in 1921 to mean “a stolid, usually unimaginative person, especially a writer or public figure.” Allen made up the term in a playful essay in Harper’s Magazine , “The Goon and his Style”: “A goon is a person with a heavy touch, as distinguished from a jigger, who has light touch. While jiggers look on life with a genial view, goons take a stolid and literal view” (121). Since then it has developed a great range of meanings.

Alice the Goon, a dull-witted muscular character in a popular comic strip from 1933 has been regarded as influential on the subsequent development ( Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang , 1994). A comment in Life (November 14, 1938) showed the extension of the meaning: “The word ‘Goon’ was first popularized by college students who used it to mean any stupid person.” American Speech noted two senses: in 1941, Goon denoted “a soldier who falls into the lowest [intelligence] category in Army classification,” but in the context of labor union parlance the word had a more sinister sense, meaning a “beat-up man” or “a member of the labor-union’s beef-squad … who can be depended on to cow and frighten recalcitrant union-members” (1938, vol. XIII, 178). The German connection in the sense of “a prison-camp guard” is recorded only from 1945, being also found from the same date in Australian English.

Two related forms are also recorded. The English dialect term gooney , recorded from 1872, meaning a stupid or silly person, is found in the same sense in the Maine and Cape Cod dialects from 1896 and 1904, respectively. It subsequently emerged in xenophobic use, similar to gook , of “dark- or yellow-skinned natives, especially in military service” in various theaters of war, including the Nicaraguan (1927), the Japanese (1943), and the Korean (1953). In the Vietnam War gooner was used of a Communist Vietnamese soldier from 1969. The English radio comedy program called “The Goon Show,” which used bizarre humor, absurd plots, and curious voices, dates from 1951, but is an independent usage.

Goon is thus a prime example of a word that, lacking a clear referential sense, has been taken over as a term of abuse with various applications.