Posted by kid_A on May 23, 2002, at 18:10:05
In reply to an annoying little spelling correction » krazy kat, posted by christophrejmc on May 23, 2002, at 16:28:34
It's entirely meaningless to take offense at a word simply because it happens to resemble another word which by all rights may be offensive to others. In this case it was a mispelling, so It hardly merits mentioning, but what about the following, which I quote from a Salon article, concerning an even more similarly sounding word..."Take such squeamishness a little further and you have the shameful attack on David Howard, the white director of a Washington D.C. municipal agency who told his staff that, in light of budget cutbacks, he would have to be "niggardly" with funds. An uproar followed that resulted in Howard's resignation, which was accepted by Mayor Anthony Williams on the grounds that Howard had shown poor judgment.
Even some of the commentators who admitted that they knew that "niggardly" has no relation to "nigger" (the origins of the first word predate those of "nigger" by about 300 years) still condemned Howard. They were answered by the columnist Tony Snow, who wrote, "David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who a) didn't know the meaning of the word 'niggardly' b) didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover the word's meaning and c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance."There was a similar protest about a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor who used "niggardly" during a Chaucer class -- this time the complaint came from a student to whom the professor had explained the word's origins. And a professor at Jefferson Community College in Louisville was dismissed because of the lone protest of one black student (out of nine in class of 22) upset by the professor's inclusion of "nigger" in a class discussion on taboo words."
I do in fact believe the author of the above text is african american if you are at all interested in that fact.
poster:kid_A
thread:5148
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20020510/msgs/5209.html