niggardly, adjective
and adverb. Parsimonious, stingy, sparing, scanty, giving or given grudgingly
or in small amounts.
In a sentence: “When
I asked him about money, he niggardly gave me a quarter.”
Am I racist? No.
First of all, I am doing a podcast about words. And I think a choice of words
does not always reflect a philosophical opinion.
Niggardly is a
very interesting word and it got a lot of people in trouble. It has, in fact,
nothing to do with the word nigger, except that it sounds similar.
Niggardly comes
from the Old Norse verb nigla, which means “to fuss about small matters”.
Niggle, which is a minor complaint or problem, has the same root. Nigger,
however, comes from the Spanish or Portuguese word negro, which means black.
So, if you hear
the word niggardly, don’t be offended. It’s not racist. Similarly, man can also
mean the entire human race, herstory instead of history doesn’t make sense
etc., etc.
Words are very
interesting. You can express your opinion with them, both explicitly and
implicitly. But if you think, somebody said something “offensive”, ask him about
his opinion, look a word up in the dictionary or ignore it. Too many people
were drawn into controversies because of things they said, even though had
people asked them, they would have told them that they didn’t mean to be
racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory. And who are these people who get so
easily offended? Don’t they have anything better to do than getting their
feelings hurt because somebody said something?
I do love rants!
So I wanted to give you one arguing for free speech.
This is the script to an episode.
You can listen to this episode at: awordaweek.podomatic.com
Please subscribe!
Intro and outro music in the podcast: The Jam by General Fuzz (generalfuzz.net)
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