# Have you used niggardly in conversation? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 11, 2010, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-used-niggardly-in-conversation/560291 "2010-11-11T09:25:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 78
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2010, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-used-niggardly-in-conversation/560291/78 "2010-11-11T18:20:49Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > Can anyone think of a case of people using the word “niggardly” on the Straight Dope who weren’t making an allusion to the “nigger/niggardly” confusion? I did a search on “niggard,” the noun form that sounds more like the racial slur. I got 65 hits. The word has never been used in casual conversation on this board. It shows up in discussions like this one, and in quotes from Shakespeare, Pound, and Tolkien. That’s it. “Niggardly” gets 654 hits (about 50 of them this week), so I’m not going to look back over all those. But I did find one legit usage and it’s from only three months ago. > [@Comparative Medical Costs: Canada - U.S. - A Data Point](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/comparative-medical-costs-canada-u-s-a-data-point/547576/17): > > It is not mentioned much but one of the drivers of US health care costs is the exorbitant cost of medical school. Had she not gotten a public health fellowship for her last two years, she would have ended up a quarter million dollars in debt. Even so, congress was so niggardly about these “fellowships” that, unlike all other scholarships and fellowships they were fully taxed as income. So we can say it happened once, but it’s used in discussions of the controversy way more than it’s used on its own. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-used-niggardly-in-conversation/560291)._