This is an interesting argument, but I would counter with the belief that none of the words you offer create precisely the same nuance as “niggardly.”
Avaricious implies greed and coveting, much more so than niggardly does.
Cheap implies monetary stinginess, and the concept of penny-wise and pound foolish.
Close-fisted, pinchpenny, and miserly also imply a monetary component.
Economical is not nearly as perjorative; neither is frugal or thrifty.
Grudging is close, but it implies a genuine reluctance and sense that despite the reluctance, the requisite praise will be forthcoming.
Mean is far too general.
Scrimping, skimping, and sparing all imply an ongoing process of watchful expenditure.
Uncharitable and ungenerous imply that what’s owed is generosity or charity.
The reason English is such a rich language is that of all the words you listed that mean something close to niggardly, not one precisely captures the feeling that “niggardly” does. It’s the reason the word is rare: the circumstances for its proper use are rare. But if they exist, then I fail to see why someone else’s ignorance should prohibit my use of the precisely correct word.
Yes, I’ve read 1984. But in Orwell’s fable, language was being manipulated to further cow the populace into submission. (I thought that was one of his weaker ideas, but never mind.) Here one word is being avoided because it is a loose homophone to one of the most offensive words in our language. I’m as concerned about the dumbing down of American culture as anyone else, but I think the loss of “Niggard” or “Niggardly” is understandable. You can still use it amongst your close friends if you want, there isn’t a literal thought police who will arrest you, but personally it’s not worth it for me to use it in public discourse.
You increase language’s utility when you can communicate an idea clearly and forcefully, without distracting your audience from the idea. I’m deeply familiar wtih the meaning and the etymology of “niggardly,” and when I read it in a text (George RR Martin is very fond of it, using it multiple times in some of his books), it distracts me from whatever the author is intending to communicate, as it brings up all this baggage.
When you read the word in context, do you start thinking about the word’s history and current controversy, or does all that slip your mind as you focus solely on the word’s meaning?
I suspect my experience is common among my potential audience, and since I don’t want to distract them from the idea I’m trying to convey, I’ll not use the word. That increases the utility of language for me.
Edit: does your selective quoting of my post to point out the part you disagree with mean you stipulate everything else in the post?
No. It means that I chose the most clear point of disagreement to highlight and discuss. It’s the part of your post that I most definitively and completely reject; my failure to identify other areas is indifference, not approbation.
You are being, in my view, penny-wise and pound-foolish. By this I mean that the automatic choice to eschew any a word choice that might confuse your audience certainly advances the short-term goal of clarity and reduces the opportunities for distraction against which you ably inveigh.
However, in so doing, you cement the rarity of these words and consign them to the literary dustbin, furthering their isolation from your audience. A better approach, in my view, is the vigorous exercise of the precise word, together with appropriate contextual clues and commentary to lessen or eliminate the distraction. Following this path lets me use words like inveigh, approbation, and consign instead of their poorer country cousins, and contributes to a richer vocabulary environment.
…except that my arguments don’t apply to words like inveigh, approbation, and consign, since none of them carry the risk not merely of lack of understanding, but of active and pernicious misunderstanding, that "niggardly"does. Indeed, there are very, very few words in English in a similar situation. There’s no pound here with which to be foolish.
No, I wouldn’t. I might well avoid it for a different reason, though, the same reason I’d avoid “inflammable”. That is, if I thought there was significant risk my audience would think I meant the opposite of what I actually meant, and if I didn’t feel like taking the time to educate them, I might use a different word.
With “niggardly,” the danger isn’t that the audience will think I meant the opposite of what I meant. In fact, the audience will probably derive my meaning, or something reasonably close to it, even if they think it’s a racist slur. The danger is that the audience will do one of two things:
If they don’t recognize the word and its etymology, they might think I’m saying something totally racist, and then my message will be lost in the accusations and explanations (or, at best, buried resentments) that follow.
If they do recognize the word and its etymology, they might get distracted by wondering why I chose that word, or thinking about the recent controversies around the word, or thinking about how smart they are for not thinking it’s a racist slur, and my message will still be lost.
Enervate, inveigh, and pretty much every other word in the language doesn’t fall into a similar trap. The closest example I can think of was when a sports writer, talking about Jeremy Lin, used the “chink in the armor” expression. Even though it’s a perfectly fine expression without racist etymology, I wouldn’t in a million years use it to describe a person of Chinese descent, because even if I didn’t mean it in a “hee hee I’m so clever” racist way, my meaning would be lost in suspicions of same.
And this calculation I’m making doesn’t remotely come close to destroying the English language. Indeed, my willingness to make exactly this sort of calculation enables me to communicate much more clearly.
If they do recognize the word and its etylomology, they might assume you are a massive tool whose main joy in life is being obnoxious with the English language, and they might ask you to exit the conversation until you show the maturity necessary to talk like a sensible adult. Furthermore, they might actively try to avoid your company in the future lest your stupid mouth gets the idea to ask for a faggot to smoke within earshot of a whole bunch of gay people (some of whom might pump iron and not take too kindly to slurs). And they might rightly assume that, following such a move, you will turn around around and bat your eyes with faux sincerity as you point out with stupefying douchedness that the dictionary backs up your usage and thus, you can refer to cigarettes as faggots with impunity, nah nah. So rather than deal with all of this, they might summarily place you in the same reject pile other socially retarded people are dumped everyday.
On a housekeeping note, I think the moderators should go ahead and make this thread a sticky so every time National Whine About Niggardly Week comes, folks will know where to post their grievances about this 10 year-old tragedy of epic, 911-like proportions. I mean, if we gotta hash out the same arguments year after year, we might as well make it easy on ourselves.