Posted on 02/09/2014 10:38:36 AM PST by nickcarraway
A black Brit on his way to the U.S. wants to know if his use of the word will be offensive—and whether he should care.
“Niggardly.” Go on, I dare you. Say it. Savor those syllables. Let your tongue caress those consonants. If you’re black and reading this, you may well have just laughed, smiled knowingly, been confused or even taken offense, depending on the size of your vocabulary. If you’re white and reading this, you will probably have just experienced a mild frisson of linguistic danger, as you are either fully aware of the ramifications that your verbalizing the word might have if misconstrued, or dumb enough to think that you’re being genuinely offensive.
When, exactly, is it acceptable to use the word “niggardly”? I speak as someone who loves language, but also as someone who loves people. I’m an ardent humanist and would never seek to offend another’s feelings gratuitously.
I speak, too, as a black Briton about to move to New York to pursue his career in the U.S., but also as a proud heir to the ornate vocabulary of some of our greatest English writers, like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Gibbon and Dickens, all of whom have used the word in their respective works.
Let us be very clear at the outset. “Niggardly” means parsimonious or stingy and is derived from the Old Norse language. “Niggardly,” as you will thankfully already know or will doubtless be relieved to hear, is not related to the Latin word for black—“niger”—and thus is in no way etymologically connected to the deeply pernicious, pejorative racial epithet known in common parlance as the n-word.
(Excerpt) Read more at theroot.com ...
Just say cheap.
I’d say: Don’t be niggardly in your use of the word “niggardly”. Freedom of speech, you know. It isn’t your fault if others are ignorant of words.
In our post modern age, the use of the word “niggardly” has passed into the realm of the use of the word “gay”.
I had a very liberal History professor at Cleveland State who accidentally used “niggardly” in a casual statement and damn it if every rotten one of our so-called “black students” got up on their haunches and bitched the poor bastard out.
All I could hear from him was, “yeah but . . . yeah but . . . yeah but.”
I laughed my ass off at his trying to defend himself and at their total stupidity. But those chips were on their shoulders was back in 1979.
I’m waiting to see it show up in a rap song.
Oh yeah, it was in that rap song about Silas Marner.
While technically it comes from a different root word, the fact is that nobody says it anymore.
Back in the 70’s there was a big media uproar about the use of the word and media defended the use. And then nobody has used it since. Also a college was used and a teacher lost his job over the use of that word.
The simple fact is that it sounds too similar to the “n” word regardless of the original root being different.
Use “Cheap” it’s easier to say and will keep you out of trouble.
Thank you, teacher’s union, for keeping kids ignorant.
How about miserly?
I was recently in China and there is a Mandarin word for “that” or “you” or “them” (never was sure the context) that is pronounced exactly like the N word...
cheap sounds like a baby chicken
Use frugal stingy penurious parsimonious.
A good scanadahoovian word...... so tight you can’t even find your first penny
That’s very nice and dandy for him to say, but we live in reality land, where public officials have been fired in DeeCee for saying it.
a Jr. Hi buddy actually got an attaboy from a teacher for using this word in a paper to describe his view of his weekly allowance. Of course that was back when we were all racists...
As a matter of fact, when I was an undergrad at a large Midwestern university, the student newspaper had a headline based on some research by an astronomy prof at the university: "The Excitability of Black Holes". OMG. The controversy, the s-storm of verbiage which could have filled the famous football stadium, cannot even be described. The black student union threatened all kinds of actions, etc. which only served to highlight their utter ignorance of astronomy. The headline had NOTHING to do with the anatomy of black females, but EVERYTHING to do with a cosmic body of exceedingly enormous gravity from which nothing, not even light, can escape, which is formed by the death and gravitational collapse of a massive star.
Apparently much the same thing happened in 2010 when Hallmark put out a greeting card featuring the term "black hole".
What is puzzling to me is why perfectly legitimate astronomical terms are eagerly attacked by blacks as "racist" but their own (c)rap music is chock-full of references to "b__ches", "ho's", and other derogatory terms.
It’s a word I would only use here on FR. It’ s pretty much archaic now.
I recall a city council meeting in D.C. several years ago where someone used the word niggardly in a finance debate and a council member became racially indignant over its use...more evidence of public education in D.C.
What gets me is that their skin in no more black than mine is white. I think it's totally out of hand. I'm sick and tired of "black" this and "white" that. Sounds a lot like S. Africa's apartheid crap that they supposedly got rid of.
Now, if astronomers talked about "Negro" holes . . . well . . . that'd be a different thing. Maybe they could call them "Baby Momma" holes.
Resist. Refuse to live a “post modern” lifestyle.
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