goonn.

1921 F. L. Allen in Harper's Mag. Dec. 121/1 (title) The Goon and his Style.

1921 F. L. Allen in Harper's Mag. Dec. 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’.

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 E. Partridge Dict. R.A.F. Slang 30 Goon, a fool, very stupid fellow; a gaper.

1946 R. Chandler Red Wind 28 Some goon here plays chess. You?

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.

1957 R. M. Wardle Oliver Goldsmith i. 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.

1938 Amer. Speech 13 178 In the Pacific Northwest we hear the word goon on every hand. Locally a goon is a member of a labor-union's beef-squad; that is, a person of imposing physique and inferior moral and mental qualities who can be depended on to cow and frighten recalcitrant union-members.

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’.

1940 Chicago Tribune 28 Jan. 1/8 ‘Goon’ is a term applied to hired sluggers used in labor troubles... A typical goon murder was the recent killing in Chicago of..a garage~man involved in a union dispute.

1959 C. Williams Man in Motion viii. 106 Except for being a rat, a fink, a scab, a thug, and a goon, he's one of the sweetest guys you'll ever meet.

1969 New Yorker 20 Dec. 88/3 Many so-called ‘goons’—civilian terrorists, sometimes dressed in Constabulary uniforms—took over in many provinces.

1971 Blitz (Bombay) 6 Mar. 13/4 Attempts on his life by goons allegedly employed by the Calcutta police authorities.

1971 It 2 June 5/1 Heath orders Habershon of Barnet CID to ‘turn London over’. And he does exactly that..with 500 goons and a score of specially trained dogs.

1945 G. Morgan Only Ghosts can Live 140 I think it was an Australian who first called the Germans ‘Goons’.

1945 G. Morgan Only Ghosts can Live 140 The cry, ‘Goon up!’ remained in many camps a warning of the approach of the Detaining Power.

1948 Amer. Speech 23 218 The word for German was invariably goon among airmen, American and British alike... It was also used as the adjective part of a compound noun,..e.g. a goon-box was one of the guard towers along the fences around the camp.

1952 E. F. Davies Illyrian Venture xi. 218 At midnight the Goon Postern (German sentry) was astounded to see a large naked form flying three times round the courtyard in a temperature of 25 degrees of frost.

1962 V. Nabokov Pale Fire 55 Morning finds us marching to the wall Under the direction of some goon Political, some uniformed baboon.

1951 Radio Times 25 May 18/2 (heading) Crazy people... Radio's Own Crazy Gang ‘The Goons’.

1951 Radio Times 25 May 18/3 Spike Milligan..has compiled the ‘Goon Show’ material.

1958 Observer 18 May 14/4 The department of jokes, only a shadow of its former self without the Goons.

1958 Listener 25 Sept. 481/2 Lovers of the Goon Shows.

1962 A. Nisbett Technique Sound Studio x. 173 Just about the ultimate in this line of effects was reached when in a ‘Goon Show’ the script demanded ‘a 16-ton, 1½-horsepower, 6-litre, brassbound electric racing organ fitted with a cardboard warhead’.

1970 Sun 28 July 3/5 The Goons are returning to radio—after 10 years in cold storage.

1971 S. Milligan in D. Nathan Laughtermakers ii. 49 Prisoners of war called their German guards goons but I got it from Popeye. There was a creature called the Goon which had nothing in the face at all except hair... I liked the word and we called it The Goons.

1956 A. Crawley Escape from Germany 31 Watch towers..covering the interior of the camp. To the prisoners they were known as ‘goon boxes’.

1963 Times 21 Feb. 16/7 Mr Horst Buchholz, whose mixture of American and Indian accents is given an even more goon-like quality by the over-used attempt to inject local colour with the tag-phrase ‘isn't it?’

1967 Listener 10 Aug. 187/3 And I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, a happy reminder of happy Goon-type days.

1943 C. H. Ward-Jackson It's a Piece of Cake 32 Goonskin, observer's flying suit and parachute harness made in one piece.

1957 C. F. Rawnsley & R. Wright Night Fighter 37 The fur-lined leather trousers and jacket known to us as ‘Goon Skins’.

1951 Picture Post 16 June 34 Four young comics—Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers—have at last got together in a radio programme. In ‘Crazy People’ they put across their favoured kind of humour. This they call ‘goonery’... General opinion was that if you like crazy, pun-dizzy, logic-smashing comedy that doesn't despise your intelligence, you'll like the Goons.

1958 Vogue Jan. 49/1 George Devine and Joan Plowright..made this extraordinary play a startlingly moving piece of theatre and gave the dialogue..a quality of abstract Goonery.

1959 Listener 12 Mar. 485/2 An hour..which had some elements of Goonery.

1968 Times 27 Feb. 3/8 This is a victory for Spike Milligan and goonery.

1921 F. L. Allen in Harper's Mag. Dec. 122/1 A goonish style is one that reads as if it were the work of a goon. It is thick and heavy.

1959 Sunday Times 29 Mar. 17/5 Photographs by Inge Morath that have that air of solemnity suppressing a giggle that has become known, in this country at least, as ‘goonish’.

1960 Design July 23/1 If you can force yourself past the first few sentences the Goonish mixture is oddly funny.