Moments of Permanence - Wait, what?

From: angrylemur.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 05:37 am (UTC) (Link)

"Niggardly" is a British word that was generally used to mean "cheap" before it became obsolete.

The n-word itself is a corruption of "negro", which is Spanish for "black".

There are similar words, but they have different etymologies and meanings. The similarity is, I think, mostly just a weird coincidence. It's called a false cognate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate) when that happens, apparently.

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 06:13 am (UTC) (Link)

Things you do not know about me because we only "met" recently: I double major in History and Linguistics. I know what false cognates are; I've proved them. However, that isn't what this is; words of identical spelling, with strong similarities of meaning, both occurring in nineteenth-century English, are unlikely candidates for false cognate status.

I know niggardly is a different word with different etymology. (It's also a word I didn't mention in this post, so I'm not sure why you brought it up.) I also know the explanation of "nigger" as corruption of "negro". This is why I am surprised and intrigued to find nigger being used to describe white working-class men in Britain in 1839; whether "nigger" had other associations in the common parlance of 19th-century aristocrats, or whether it was a deliberate association between the working class and black colonial natives, or what, is unclear to me at this point.

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 07:31 am (UTC) (Link)

The latter -- deliberate association between the working classes of England and the slave / servant classes of the colonies -- sounds most likely to me. Wasn't the use of similes such as "like a darkie", "like a nigger" etc. common in the past? Small step from that to a straight substitution (all speculation without facts of course).

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 03:33 pm (UTC) (Link)

See below for context. But this is 1839. Enfranchisement at that point had just expanded to take in the middle classes and perhaps some of the skilled artisans, but these *aren't* the rabble we're talking about.

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From: arielstarshadow.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 11:26 am (UTC) (Link)

Any chance you can post the source document? That would be helpful for context purposes. :)

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 01:47 pm (UTC) (Link)

Discussing the likelihood of the police force resulting in a new totalitarian overhaul of Britain, Colonel Charles Rowan of the Metropolitan police suggested that a way to avoid the:

danger to the liberties of the country would be to give the power absolutely of dismissal to the magistrates. Thus if the Secretary of State should take it into his head to endeavour to enslave a whole country (which is not at all [illegible] likely, after paying 20 million to enfranchise the niggers) by sending six or seven additional Police Constables...

Rest isn't that relevant.

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: March 30th, 2009 03:31 pm (UTC) (Link)

I should make clear - in 1839, we're a few years after the Reform Act enfranchised much of the middle class, so long as they were reasonably well-off; the poor were still unenfranchised. He's not even talking about Really Poor people, just... tradesmen and the like.

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From: troubleinchina.livejournal.com Date: March 31st, 2009 04:52 am (UTC) (Link)

There is something about that niggling at the back of my head, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It has something to do with some readings in my thesis class. I'll try and think about it more in the morning.

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From: seselt.livejournal.com Date: April 1st, 2009 12:30 pm (UTC) (Link)

Once the word nigger was established as a pejorative it has been used against a variety of disenfranchised groups. The Irish have been called 'the niggers of Europe' as have the Gypsies.

I think this is because the coloured to white racist epithets like craker (from African-Americans) or ghost (from Chinese) were rarely heard in Europe until after WW2. If your source document dates from 1839, I doubt the author would have been aware of any Caucasion denigrating insults. So a white person would probably use an established curse to belittle his/her target group. Pretty much the only other choice than nigger would be calling someone a Jew and anti-semitism was never as rife in England as it was in the rest of Europe.

A white person calling another white person a nigger is credible to me as I saw a documentary where an ethnic Russian was referring to ethnic Chechens as 'blacks' in a very derogatory way.

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