Absolutely; for example, it’s part of a graceful compliment paid by King Elessar in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Eomer and Eowyn of Rohan on the occasion of Eowyn’s betrothal to Faramir. But they left that wording out of the movie version, and wisely, IMHO.
Tolkien was writing at a time when the actual n-word was in casual use in the UK. I’ve got a couple of old versions of mystery books, they’ll really take you aback sometimes.
And, possibly more to the point, I don’t think a use by an English professor in the UK in the 1940’s is an indication that the word “niggardly” has recently been in common use in the United States.
No, I don’t think puzzlegal was trying to suggest anything about recent common American use: as she noted in her post that I replied to, it’s most familiar from “older literature”.
The Lord of the Rings is even more of a special case, of course, because Tolkien was trying to retroactively implement an ancient “English-peoples” legendarium analogous to the literary heritage of the Norse sagas. So LoTR is absolutely stuffed full of somewhat archaic Germanic words of Old English and Norse derivation. “Niggard”, “meads”, “ghyll”, “ell”, it’s all part of Tolkien’s deliberately Middle-Englishy tone.
Yes. It’s a word that used to be in my “use when writing” vocabulary, because I read a lot of older literature when I was young, so I had a large and somewhat old-fashioned vocabulary.
A bit less off tangent from the op … you may be able to guess from my avatar that I don’t care much about shampoo. Actually I use Bonners for all my body cleansing needs scalp inclusive and the two pack from Costco (peppermint) may last me forever.
But how much actual difference is there between Brand X’s product for dry or for oily or neither hair??
Hair or there should one care?
I’m not sure how much difference there is in any one brand’s variations.
But I have found, over the years, that some shampoo doesn’t get my hair feeling clean; shampoos claiming to be designed for daily use in particular generally don’t, I think they make themselves usable that way by not doing very much at any particular use. It may well depend on the particular hair, though.
And some shampoos leave my hair less tangly than others; with some I need to use a conditioner or I can’t get a comb through it, with others the shampoo alone will do fine.
Plus I think most of them smell bad. I’d get unscented if I could, but unscented shampoo is really rare, and most of it seems to fall into the ‘doesn’t get my hair clean’ category.
Thank you. Yeah, I know this change isn’t a big deal, but there’s a whole background of people and companies insisting on changes, often without consulting those they are supposedly helping, and then accusing anyone who objects for any reason of bigotry.
This is a thread full of (afaik) white people discussing and defending this change at great length, and just like the one about ‘indian summer’, there is zero input from the people affected. That makes me skeptical about who this is really aimed at. And why are there so few black people posting on this board?
I was curious so I looked at a mostly black message board to see what people there were saying. There were only a few posts. Most of the discussion was about taking Aunt Jemima off packaging; I learned something there.
I’ll second the comment that yes, there are differences. The products for dry hair mostly leave me feeling like i still need to wash my hair. And some leave my hair more…i dunno…coarse?..fluffy?..tangly? than others. And I’ve shampooed with just Dr. Bronner’s in a pinch, at a hotel, and it leaves my hair hard to manage. It works great as an emergency laundry soap for washing a garment in the sink, though, so i always carry a little when i travel.
I thought of dresses. They are Petite, Misses and Plus. Both petite and plus are obviously about size. Misses does not say anything about size (but is about gender - another topic).
Maybe a similar type term could be used. I can’t think of one off the top of my head.
As someone with curly hair (often worn straight), I’m seeing more marketing that looks like this:
None of this labels any of these curl patterns as “normal” - but my 2c/3a curls take a completely different set of products than someone who is 3c/4a. And you do have to be careful curly hair product shopping - curly having so many meanings.
So now I’ve gotten curious about what the actual product differences are, and what makes a product marketed as being for “normal” hair, not a best choice for median or average Black hair (other than marketing).
To the first I could find this!
Now of course even in my ignorant state I appreciate that the hair of Blacks has a wide variety of types, but is on average of a different average type than is the hair of whites … and that hair has a whole load of cultural meanings for Black Americans that is very different than many white subgroups. But what is actually different about hair products targeted to Black consumers than the hair products targeted to white consumers and what actual hair need is it based on?
I have zero knowledge of how hair products for Black people’s hair differ from hair products for any other hair. In fact, it surprises me, and this thread is the first I’ve heard of it.
I know that barbers and hair dressers need different skills to cut tightly curled hair as compared to straighter hair, but i would have guessed the same shampoos worked for all people and most other mammals.
I may ask my daughter in law.
Also, your cite supports my shopping for products that contain laurel sulphates. I’ve had good luck with those, and that’s what i look for these days.
But, even without any racial component, i can think of lots of other people who might prefer it if their shampoo company doesn’t imply they are “not normal”. Teenagers of every race come to mind. So this seems like a good change.
There is some crossover between human and non-human shampoo products, most notably the well-known Mane ‘n’ Tail brand, but there are differences in the formulation that may make non-human shampoo products less desirable for some people.
Dog shampoo in particular is not generally recommended for human use, due mostly to skin pH differences. For the same reason, human shampoos are not recommended for dog washing.
Well, my daughter-in-law says,
generally, yeah. the hair texture is different, so it benefits from different concoctions
This is also the first she’s heard of this, so they aren’t getting all that much press. But she thought it was a good idea not to single out one type of hair as “normal”.
Curly hair is generally drier than straight because the sebum doesn’t spread down the shaft as easily. Which means it shouldn’t be washed as often and you need a milder shampoo. Also many black people have chemically treated hair, which makes it more fragile, and the different styling requires different products. The coconut oil I mentioned earlier helps define the curls and reduce frizz. That’s what my sister uses in my niece’s hair.
Yeah, if you’re not being constantly bombarded with media recreational outrage about the evils of left-wing “wokeness”, you might not even notice most of this stuff. I doubt I’d ever have consciously encountered this issue if the OP hadn’t started a thread to harrumph about it.
Some day in the distant future, historians are going to look back and conclude we are now in the grips of a mass insanity.
She’s kind of libertarian, politically. So i wouldn’t expect her to get too excited about some company choosing to modify their marketing. 
While I agree that responding to a minor modification of commercial shampoo branding by melodramatically demanding “What adjectives will be left? Will the English language (or all languages) be stripped of all adjectives?” does come across as a bit unbalanced, I remain optimistically hopeful that such reactions aren’t really as “mass” as the amplifying effects of modern social media might suggest.