I’ve found that a good way to gauge the popularity of a word is to see how often it turns up on Google News. And there is plenty of niggling there.
Here’s one from Wired from 3 days ago.
And those mostly seem like sources outside the US. Wired is in the US, i think. I would have used “nagging” is that sentence.
Niggling has the connotation of both small and hard to eradicate. Nagging implies the latter, but less so the former.
All I can say is that I have been in the US all my life and never considered “niggling” to be in any way obscure, or archaic. Usually connected to the word “doubt”
Likewise. There does seem to be a strange disconnect here. Geographical, maybe?
I wouldn’t assume that. I used the word ‘niggling’ fairly frequently for many years, as in “I’ve got a niggling feeling that…” It’s quite useful in that particular turn of phrase, and if you google it you will find many, many examples. Of course, I am more careful about its use now, but its use is absolutely, positively not limited to trolls.
ETA: Sorry to pile on, I didn’t see all those more recent posts saying essentially the same thing I did.
Pretty normal word for me, too, though for me the phrase I hear it more often in is “niggling detail.”
Interesting. I would use “nagging” in that sentence, too.
Perhaps it is geographical.
But I’d say “annoying” in that sentence.
Your ‘what if someone mis-overheard it in a bar?’ scenario is significantly more likely to happen with the word ‘vinegar’ than the other example words previously discussed because it’s a more commonly used word and actually sounds more similar to the N word than does ‘niggle/niggling’. Salt & vinegar flavour crisps and snacks are on sale right there in most pubs; vinegar is a condiment that pub/restaurants might have, but might not be on the table; some people put salt and vinegar on fish and chips (other people hate it), so they might be talking about that around a table in a pub.
Yes. I really do think they are quite similar.
It’s the people who comment on things telling other people what they should do. It’s really common on the internet. I’m a little surprised you haven’t heard of it.
Some of them seem more trivial and ridiculous than others, I concede, but I think they all come from a similar sort of place - usually well-meaning but sometimes angry prescription of how other people should behave in order to fit into a very particular and nitpicky template of ‘how things ought to be if they were better’
It doesn’t just happen with speech of course - there are people out there telling other people, for example, how they are using a knife wrong and should change their ways in case someone gets hurt, and so on.
It certainly won’t happen if, every time anyone raises the slightest doubt about a word they don’t know, the assumed reaction is “don’t use that word, get rid of it.”
Don’t you think a human being interacting with others has a duty to find out the truth about a word they are ignorant of?
If I read a book and I reach an unfamiliar word, I look it up. If someone uses a word I misunderstand or don’t know, I ask them to clarify. No great hardship and I end up knowing more words.
All words that are declared “unusable” are a loss, pretty much by defintion. And synonyms don’t all carry with them the same nuanced meaning in all contexts, nor the same rythym, rhyme and feeling.
A niggling pain is not necessarily a nagging pain (and that is assuming that “nagging” will remain a word that can be used without anyone complaining about it, that is no certainly if your preferred approach is taken)
I’m not saying, BTW, that all and any changes to language on these sorts of grounds are spurious, indeed, recently I resolved not to use the traditional common name of a species of fungus, because it sounds a bit antisemitic (and probably was rooted in antisemitism at the time it was coined)
But IMO, the spurious requests of the nature ‘you should stop doing x’ vastly outnumber the legitimate ones.
Ok, so ignore the ones you think are spurious. No one is going to arrest you.
From what I can see, the majority of people using absolutes like “you shouldn’t ever say x, full stop” are the ones erecting strawmen. What is being said is, “you should consider the impact of saying x.”
And while the racists are the ones who get angriest about the idea that language choices should be thoughtful, deliberate, and kind, these ideas aren’t really directed at them. Of course they’re going to dig in. The effort is to convince good people that some methods of dismantling racism are small and maybe appear inconsequential in a vacuum.
That’s what I do. I didn’t fear arrest. I thought we were having a discussion.
Thank you. I suppose it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actually going on, amid all the noise.
ETA: (and yes, I acknowledge some of the noise was me)
You are welcome to double-check the word frequency table I used (contemporary American English) and/or to try to break it down by region, but it is not uncommon enough to draw any notice, and of course not racist. Not sure what this word is supposed to be an example of.
I really haven’t seen a single one of those before your post.
Well, kinda the carbon one, but I always took it as more of a joke pointed at the “organic” movement, and not to be taken seriously.
And I’ve never heard of a ketchup packet called a sachet. Googling, it does seem to be a thing, if a bit obscure. I wouldn’t use it, and depending on context, I may advise that a speaker should know their audience, and maybe avoid it to prevent confusion, but I’d say that’s more an attempt at helping facilitate communication than a condemnation of your language.
I don’t know where you see these, are these comments on your channel? Don’t read those, lots of trolls that exist just to try to piss you off, with no good faith.
OTOH, I can kinda see where someone may be coming from if you are using terminology that they have to stop the video to look up. If you give good context, then maybe they learn something, if you don’t give context, then they can be left confused about what you are saying, and spend more trying to figure out your word use than what your actual point is.
I don’t know the context where you saw these, so I can only speculate.
I’m not sure the point of that example, is it saying that there are sometimes very legitimate reasons to tell someone how they ought to do something? I spent about 20 years in food service, and there are actually right ways and wrong ways of using a knife, and using it the wrong way can hurt themselves or others. ( A particular prep cook with a tendency to talk with their hands while holding a knife comes to mind.)
I haven’t heard these specific ones - but I have seen a lot of similar complaints that basically consist of “This is a forum mostly populated by Americans so stop using “holiday” to mean vacation” (elsewhere, not so much here) or something like “Anti-social has a specific meaning, it doesn’t mean you just don’t like to interact with people” ( the fact that a word has a specific definition in a particular field doesn’t mean that every other usage is wrong - but some people act like it does)