Reply #338: Wow, that's quite an assumption you jumped to there.

[FatDave]

I'm saying nothing at all regarding literacy. I'm saying that it could be used, because of being a near homonym to the most racist word in our language, as a way to poke at a person of color and deny you were doing it.

Pretend for a moment I'm black. I've got a good vocabulary, including the word "niggardly", which I know should have no racial overtones whatsoever. I'm at a store with a white acquaintance. Maybe somebody I work with. As I'm being checked out, I complain to the cashier about a recent 1 cent raise in sales tax. The guy I'm with says, "Jeez, Dave, don't be so niggardly."

Now, why did he use a vernacularly obscure word that closely resembles the big daddy of racial slurs? Why not miserly? Why not something much more common, like stingy, or cheap? These all mean basically the same thing, but he chose to use a word that' pretty rare in modern English (probably because of it's similarity to that other word). Would I not be justified in considering that it was probably a passive-aggressive (emphasis on the aggressive) attack?

That's all I'm saying.