Niggardly

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Niggardly is a word synonymous with stingy and miserly, and a niggard (noun) is a miser. They are both derived from the Old Norse verb nigla, meaning "to fuss about small matters". (The English word "niggle" retains the original Norse meaning.)

The word is not related to the word nigger, though someone unfamiliar with the word "niggardly" might take offense due to the superficial phonetic similarity between the words. (The word negro is the Spanish root, meaning the color Black.)

David Howard incident

On January 15, 1999, David Howard, a white aide to Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., United States, used the word in reference to a budget. This apparently upset one of his black colleagues (identified by Howard as Marshall Brown), who incorrectly interpreted it as a racial slur and lodged a complaint. As a result, on January 25 Williams forced Howard to resign.

However, after an internal review into the matter and pressure from the gay community (of which Howard was a member), the mayor offered Howard the chance to return to his position as Office of the Public Advocate on February 4. Howard refused but accepted another position with the mayor instead.

The Howard incident led to a national debate in the U.S., in the context of racial sensitivity and political correctness, on whether use of the word niggardly should be avoided because of its potential association with the extremely pejorative racial slur nigger, despite the entirely separate and unrelated etymologies of the two words ("nigger" derives from niger, the Latin for "black").

just a little of what i learned in linguistics 1.  cant say it didnt have its moments...