Sen. Sherrod Brown denounces ‘niggardly’ colleagues

[JackRiddler]

16. Depends on etymology, no? (use of "niggardly")

Apparently first use in 14th c. Britain and unlikely to have any realation to negro, an adoption from the Spanish word for black in the 16th c.

Points for Hitchens in the below...

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=niggard&searchmode=none

niggard
mid-14c., nygart, of uncertain origin. The suffix suggests French origin (cf. -ard), but the root word is probably related to O.N. hnøggr "stingy," from P.Gmc. *khnauwjaz (cf. Swed. njugg "close, careful," Ger. genau "precise, exact&quot , and to O.E. hneaw "stingy, niggardly," which did not survive in Middle English.

niggardly
1560s, from niggard + -ly (2).
It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved — having felt the word hanging in the air a bit — to say "parsimonious" from then on. (Christopher Hitchens, "The Pernicious Effects of Banning Words," Slate.com, Dec. 4, 2006)

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1725/is-niggardly-a-racist-word

Sure, the origin of "niggard" is unclear, but not its timeline, which predates the N-word in the English language by a couple hundred years at least. "Niggard" comes up as early as Chaucer, late 14th century. The most commonly speculated origin is Scandanavian nig/Old Norse hnoggr, meaning miserly. Don't know how much faith you want to put in Indo-European roots, but one meaning of the root ken- is conjectured to relate a family of words with a connotation implying closing, tightening, or pinching (the family of related words is hypothesized to include such n-words as nap, nibble, nod, nosh, neap, nip). The racial slur "nigger," on the other hand, doesn't enter the lexicon until the 1500's, first as "neger" or "neeger," obviously from the same root as the French negre and Spanish negro, words for the color black, which are derived from the Latin niger.

There's nothing you can do about homonyms and associations, however. And who knows, maybe the two words have become associated in people's minds through the centuries, so that 200 years ago people started thinking one had to be related to the other. Now of course, no one even knows the first word any more, possibly because of the way it sounds. So when someone uses it, you see what happens. So this word is probably on the way out, but you can't blame old folk for happening to use it.