People probably didn’t even know this was a word until they saw this meme.
Meh, it comes up more often than you think. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it’s “controversial” use even. I doubt it’s as unknown to the general populous as you think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly
If you’ve never seen anybody use the word, just wait. It’ll happen eventually.
Someone in your local-level politics (a city councilman, someone on a university board, etc) or your place of employment will whip that word out, and facepalming will ensue.
It’ll be a white guy in his fifties. He’ll say that shit in a public setting. People will be like “WTF, man.” And then he’ll be like “ACKSHUALLY, Niggardly (noun: niggard) is an adjective meaning ‘stingy’ or ‘miserly’. Niggard (14th C) is derived from the Middle English word meaning ‘stingy,’ nigon, which is probably derived from two other words also meaning ‘stingy,’ namely, Old Norse hnǫggr and Old English hnēaw.”
And he will be genuinely surprised when people don’t treat him as a hero.
Never before has a username been such an incorrect description
Meh. As I’ve said before, it’s aspirational.
The middle English word for “stingy”?
We all know why they’re saying it though.
Yuh-huh.
Yes, it’s got no relation to that other word. No, that doesn’t matter.
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As an ESL: English is a fucking minefield.
I can only imagine. On the other hand, most other languages don’t have such an awesome and powerful array of offensive words. I mean, there’s such a VARIETY of them, all offensive for different reasons. Racial words, toilet and bodily function words, words that are literally related to being cursed by God, offensive words exclusively about stupid people, words related to sexual intercourse, words specifically made to offend genders and sexual orientations, etc, on and on. It’s impressive, even to a native speaker, when you really sit and think about it.
I think it comes from the sheer number of other languages that are related to English, as well as the fact that we’ll just steal words from any other language, faster than just about anyone else.
EDIT: I’m not at all implying that other languages don’t have words for all those things I listed. It’s just that most other languages don’t have the same categorization of “these words are swear words” that English does. As I understand it, most other languages have a much shorter list of words that are specifically taboo for anyone to say, in a polite context.
Rudeness in many other languages is more defined by the manner of speech, the degree of formality, etc. But we English speakers have this lovely category of words that are both nominally “forbidden,” yet also used all the time, by almost everyone.
Yeah other languages normally get their swears from words for things that are considered taboo but english just has such a variety. We have swears/slurs that are related to:
- bodily functions
- bodily fluids
- sex
- relationships
- some animals
- being sent to hell
- various other religious (mostly catholic) things
- thinking you’re better than others
- thinking others are better than you
- and probably some others that I’ve forgotten about/don’t know of
But also not all words from those categories are swears and not all of those swears are always swears. We also have words that sound/look like swears but aren’t.
edit: it would appear that I am incorrectExactly! You immediately came up with several categories that I completely forgot about, when I was listing categories of swear words. And yeah, the different levels of swearing are fascinating. And then, of course, the whole levels-of-familiarity-and-politeness-and-formality thing that other languages have? English still has that shit, it’s just not built into the formal structure of the language, the way it is in, say, Japanese.
Those politeness and familiarity levels are just based on the context of every individual, and their particular social group. Some people swear a lot in their own family setting, some people NEVER swear within their nuclear family group. Some workplace environments are RIGIDLY anti-swearing, while others are totally informal, and everyone has a potty-mouth, all the time. And any of these contexts can have their own specific house rules, in terms of which categories of swearing are more taboo.
Like: “hey, fuckface! Don’t say the fucking R-word around here, or I’ll break my foot off in your ass.” Totally a thing that I can imagine someone saying.
minefield? your field? my field? field of mines? mine? field? mine field? minefield? field mine? fieldmine?
Parsimonious is just a better word to use at that point in a rant.
Yup. It’s a cooler word, anyway.
There’s an alternate pronunciation and spelling of the word snickering. Same sentiment applies.
Weirdly, I’ve seen a lot more people just straight-up get away with that one.
Get away with it? Is there something wrong with that word? Doesn’t it just mean like giggling or something?
Well, yeah, it does just mean giggling. And, in all honesty, I’ve never actually seen anyone get roasted for using that word.
Niggardly is a whole different thing, though. Ain’t no reason to use that shit.
“Snickering”, as far as I can tell is just the American version of “sniggering”. I can’t track down the etymology of the split and so I can’t see any huge mentions of “it sounded a bit racist so we changed it” but I guess it seems plausible given things like “titbit” being changed to “tidbit”.
While someone saying “niggardly” is a bit suspicious given that it’s a pretty archaic word that most people haven’t even heard of, “sniggering” is a pretty normal word to use in Britain. I imagine if some racist wants to start using it as a bit of coded bigotry they could, American-branded homophobia has already ruined the word “fags” to describe your cigs!
Did you put the “removed” in this manually, out of interest?
Lol, the Scunthorpe problem in action
Is the issue that it sounds like an American origin racist word?
Should Spanish people also change their word for black because of youse?
Wait until they hear about the countries and people of Montenegro… or Niger… or Nigeria. I count myself as an honorary Welsh person. Nice harmless word - until you look into it and discover that it is at best a bad term. Should I go to war against anyone that uses the verb “welch” for all the negative connotations it has for my adopted people?
“Seek offence and you shall find it” - The unofficial motto of Tumblr
It’s not really a word that is used anymore, though I have encountered it in some older books.
Yeah, does “any reason” include making a meme? Because that jumped up to one of the top reasons I’ve seen that word used just today. Minutes ago, even.
“Hey, I said it with a hard D though!”
Hard D is the opposite of hard R, I guess?
A hard D is what your mom got last night.
Reminds me of when Obama was president and some totally not racist tea party conservatives suddenly just loved mentioning that the president “reneged” on this or that.
You find reneged to be racist? Americans are wild wtf.
It is when you specifically say it in reference to a black person while overemphasizing the part of the word that phonetically sounds like the first syllable of the n word. The word itself is not racist, the usage of the word to call out a person’s race as a negative attribute certainly is.
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