This could all be resolved with an informal social rule, going forward (if society can agree on it): “Complaints about the N-word shall only be taken seriously if the word in question is, in fact, the N-word.”
Well, no. Obviously not. Because actual racists do use words like “snigger” as representations of the actual slur, with a veneer of deniability.
As in the example (unrelated to the USC case) given in the USC thread, if someone were wearing a t-shirt with the characters nei-ge on it, what would you think? Is there any innocent reason why someone who wear a t-shirt with the word “that” on it?
That would be lovely. I hate having had to give up on using ‘niggardly’ when it is the precise word for what I want to express.
My beloved brother got summarily fired for using that word in front of a person with a paucity of vocabulary. Even showing HR the word in several dictionaries and giving the pertinent context did not save his career.
So using the exact synonym “stingy” is such a hardship that you’d prefer to use an obscure word that is not part of the vocabulary of at least 75% of the population, and creating an obvious risk of being misheard since the word is aurally almost identical to the slur; to risk being mistakenly thought to be using a vile racist slur in a country where racism is rife and evil people still frequently use that slur? I applaud your heroic stand to resist a reduction in the breadth of redundant vocabulary in the English language by 0.00001%.
As always the true victim of racism is the White man!
Stingy is NOT an exact synonym for niggardly - they have different shades of meaning
Certainly true. The latter is now frequently used by racists, so when you use it bear in mind that it has acquired that semantic baggage.
This, quite so. Those of us who are older know the definition as being meanly stingy. I don’t know of of any other word that means quite that. But even when I was young, the word was already problematic. @BippityBoppityBoo, I’m quite certain, is simply saying she wishes that word were still on the table, not that she doesn’t understand why it isn’t.
Why say what she did unless she thinks the reason for refraining from using it is inadequate?
Miserly?
Parsimonious?
Scrooge-like?
From numerous dealings with her on this board, I’d be stunned if she meant anything different. I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt it.
Very close, but not strong or petty enough. I’ve never had a need to use the word, but if you ever encounter it in older books, you’ll see it has a different connotation. Miserly is pretty close, though. Definitely not parsimonious.
When did niggardly become an obscure word?
Good question. Makes me feel ancient.
Probably since, widely, people have started to take care to avoid racial slurs. That’s not a slur, but it sounds like one, so lots of folks will use one of the many synonyms that don’t risk such a catastrophic miscommunication. Seems reasonable to me.
For those of us outside the US this in inherently annoying,
as mentioned, I’ve always thought of niggardly as meanly parsimonious, whereas stingy is simply unwilling to spend.
to have to modify the words we use because of ignorance in the “exceptional” country is screwed up
By that same logic - what happens to the traditional Swastica?
My daughter went to a school that had a swastica in its logo, and there was another school nearby called “Red Swastica”.
Are we going to be denied this to appease the sensibilities of 360 million who are ignorant?
Merriam-Webster’s popularity index has ‘stingy’ being in the top 30% of popular words, and ‘niggardly’ being in the top 20% FWIW. Don’t know what metrics they use for that. But it’s not a hugely obscure word, just becoming unfashionable.
I went to pick up dinner at Bangkok Thai on 5th & Broadway because it is really the best food in Thermopolis. Across the street is a two-story brick building that is at least a century old, with relief swastikas around the upper façade. A tad startling, at first, but they do turn both ways.
Maybe usage in the U.K. is different, but I never came across it in speech when I was growing up. I’m pretty sure I first came across it in literature as a teenager. And this was in an era when the Black & White Minstrel Show was on TV, so that was well before it fell into disfavor because of the resemblence to the slur.
Am I off in thinking that 75% of the population overall have probably never heard of the word?