TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Last Laugh! Telecom New Zealand Tells Woman Her Name is Gay

Re: Last Laugh! Telecom New Zealand Tells Woman Her Name is Gay

Rick Merrill (rick0.merrill@NOSPAM.gmail.com)
Tue, 08 May 2007 16:12:51 -0400

George Berger wrote:

> In article <telecom26.124.8@telecom-digest.org>,
> henry999@eircom.net (Henry) wrote:

>>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Like the time I used the word
>>> 'niggardly' in this Digest and was promptly scolded for using racist
>>> language. (That is an /a/ as the fifth letter from the left and not
>>> an /e/) PAT]

[but Pat, it's the same root word ;-) ]

>> It gets even worse than that, Pat. Some years ago there was a budget
>> analyst in the Washington, D.C. local government who referred to a
>> particular expenditure as niggardly. He was fired!

>> cheers,

>> Henry

> I do wish they had taken the time to look up the meaning of the word
> in Webster's International Dictionary, as it has very little or
> nothing to do with race.

"race" ?!

How old are you?-)

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, I am 65 in a couple months, but
I do not know about Henry. The 'nigg' prefix-portion of some words is
the rural southern America dialect of 'negro'. Many rural southerners
long ago pronounced it 'neegra'. They usually meant nothing bad by
it, it was just their way of pronouncing 'negro'. But there was a time
in northern cities when the word 'black' was likewise an insult when
it was used in the context of black Americans. But it any event, the
use of 'neegra' became abused when people started using it without
the /a/ sound on the end. 'Neegra' or 'nigger' were (still are) very
racially charged words; 'niggardly' on the other hand refers to a
person who is very stingy or miserly. Example: "This year's budget for
the school of Mathematics is very niggardly. It must have been written
up/approved by a person who is a niggard." The anthropological term
for a (racially) black person is 'Negroid'; the anthropological term
for a (racially) white person is 'Caucasian'. PAT]

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