it just a word anymore. if some redneck calls a black person a nigger, he deserves getting his ass kicked. as far as the origins of the word, i found this
N WORD ORIGINS
From
www.wordwizard.com
[I quote, with permission, from Jonathon Green:'Words Apart: The Language ofPrejudice' (Kyle Cathie Publishing, London, 1996)
If 'Negro' veers towards respectability, its slangy derivative 'nigger' leaves one in no doubt as to its intention and with it one meets gut-level racism. Alongside such race-related terms as 'kike', 'wop', 'mick 'and' spick', nigger is one of the most opprobrious of all such words. Like Negro, it comes from the French 'negre', and Spanish 'negro' and was initially spelt 'Neger', a spelling that is still found in Holland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. As the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, the term is 'colloquial and usually contemptuous... [it is] now virtually restricted to contexts of deliberate and contemptuous ethnic abuse'. Only, as the Dictionary notes, within the context of Black English vernacular, i.e. one Black person talking to another, does it shed (and then only in terms of deepest irony) its negative connotations.
The term appears in English around 1785, used by, among others, Robert Burns (recounting the legend of Noah's son Ham - the supposed progenitor of all Black races) and shortly after him Lord Byron. For them, and for a number of British writers, the term was general: it covered any Black, as much as did those otherwise characterized as 'fuzzy-wuzzies' and similar dismissives.
Kipling's 'Soldiers Three' talked blithely of 'naygurs' and they were not alone. The readers of such jingoistic journals as the 'Sporting Times' (better known as 'The Pink 'Un' - from the color of its stock - and professing racial and nationalist attitudes that would seem utterly familiar to the readers of today's 'Sun' newspaper) knew a nigger when they saw one - and certainly didn't demur in saying so.
It was in 1901 in the pages of the 'Pink 'Un', after all, that the highly respected illustrator Phil May (1864-1903) offered his drawing of 'The Complacent Coon'. There were no complaints.
Like Negro, nigger has been used in a variety of combinations since the 19th century and both Webster III (1961) and the Oxford English Dictionary list a number of these, usually referring to birds, animals and crops, without comment - the assumption being that, for better or worse, they are an accepted (if local) usage; and while they, like the parallel uses of negro, are also based on stereotypes, it is more those of color than of primarily racist assumptions.
Thus, to take examples at random, 'nigger daisy,' the 'black-eyed Susan', 'nigger fish,' a small grouper ('Cephalopholis fulvus'), found in the West Indies and off the coast of Florida; 'nigger lice', informal name of the prickly awns (bristles) of various species of plants, esp. of the genus 'Desmodium', 'nigger pea', a species of coarse black bean and 'nigger toe', a Brazil nut; 'niggerweed', queen-of-the-meadow and 'niggerwool', western sedge.
At the same time another stereotype, the traditional role of the Black man as an unskilled labourer, taking on a variety of strenuous tasks, gives a number of other terms. To take just a few, culled from the jargons of various occupations a 'nigger' can be a cotton spinner (the machine not the human), dark ore, a machine used to position logs for cutting in a sawmill, the turnip sawfly, a steamboat hoist, a motor which runs the capstan on a ship and a fault in the insulated covering on an electrical conductor. Used without the article it can denote a patois of English and African words.
That, however, is as far as equanimity goes. In addition, even that is limited: the word rankles; however it appears. Nigger is in the end a pejorative term that means Black man or woman (and is used similarly in Australia, where it has referred to the Aborigine or Native Australian since the 1840s). Classically pronounced 'nigra' (among the comedian Lenny Bruce's best-known 'bits' was that in which the southern-born president Lyndon Johnson - paradoxically a champion of Black civil rights - fought to master the respectable 'northern' word 'Negro'), it is most commonly found in the southern states of America. Occasionally one also finds the equally hostile abbreviations ''gar' or 'nig'.
Thus, one finds 'niggerdom', the world of Blacks; 'nigger-gal,' a Black woman or girl; 'nigger-boy', a Black boy; 'niggerkin' or 'niggerling, 'a Black child. A 'nigger baby', other than its obvious use, can also mean a sanicle ('Heuchera villosa'), a plant with purple flowers, a large cannon ball, (as used during the American Civil War; the gun from which they were fired being known as a 'swamp angel') or a form of sweet or candy, this last found as recently as 1948. A 'nigger killer' means both a hard taskmaster (1856) or a revolver (1944).
A 'nigger-shooter' is a slingshot, a 'nigger-trigger' a gun, a 'nigger-stick' a baton as used by prison warders and a 'nigger chaser' (1883) a small firework that scurries about on the ground (Britain's jumping-jack). A 'nigger catcher', as well as meaning a man who captured escaped slaves and returned them to their masters, also described a small, slotted leather flap on a saddle: once caught the slave would be bound and then attached to the saddle via a rope tied through this flap.
The 'nigger heaven' (otherwise known as the 'Ethiopian paradise', 'Ethiopian heaven' or the 'peanut heaven') was the upper circle or 'gods' in a theatre. Only here were seats cheap enough for Black wages. Its best-known popular use came in 1926, as the title of a best-selling look at 1920s Harlem - then a favorite center of rich, White slumming - by the socialite Carl van Vechten.
The use of nigger heaven to mean the roof of a freight car refers to the time when Blacks joined the ranks of tramps 'riding the rods' across Depression-era America.
The synonymous 'nigger gallery' referred, in the mid-19th century, to those seats, also up in the 'gods', set aside for Black patrons. The poker games of 'big' and 'little nigger' are those in which, respectively, the hand with the high or low spade splits the pot; Damon Runyon's 'Big Nig' was a crap shooter, but presumably there was some reference to the other popular gambling game.
The exclamation 'niggers!' is used as a mild oath. 'Nigger pot', however, as recounted by Terry Southern in 'Red-Dirt Marijuana' (1973) is not in fact cannabis (as the slang word 'pot') but a form of 'moonshine', illicitly distilled whisky. 'Niggero', blending the 'respectable' and the pejorative terms, merely underlines the antipathy.
The entire vocabulary, is perhaps best summed up in the mid-19th-century Americanism 'humble as a dead nigger', meaning utterly subservient and laying out, consciously or otherwise, the preferred role, as seen by many of their fellow-citizens, of the American Black.
Nor is nigger exclusively an American phenomenon. In one notorious British by-election campaign of the 1960s Conservative supporters suggested that the local electorate should 'Vote Labor if you want a nigger for your neighbor'.
Like earlier uses of the word in Britain, the reference was not to American slaves or their descendants but to West Indian and African immigrants (the former of which groups had, of course, been slaves in their own right). The less discriminating racist includes Indians and Pakistanis (and indeed anyone else with a dark skin) in the term, but 'properly' it applies to Blacks only.
The British also enjoy 'nig-nog' (which actually began life meaning a foolish person; hence, a raw and unskilled recruit) and the term has been exported to Australia, where 'nog 'and 'noggy' both mean a Vietnamese (originally the north Vietnamese soldiers and irregulars against whom Australians fought in the late 1960s).
Like America, Australia boasts a number of 'nigger' combinations, typically 'nigger-country', land inhabited by Aborigines; 'nigger farming', farming that is underwritten by a government grant to Aborigine farmers; 'nigger-twist', a form of cheap, rough tobacco 'which would knock a White man into a coma' and which was often used instead of cash to pay wages to Aborigine laborers, and 'nigger-hunting', the 19th-century hunting of Aborigines for 'sport'.
A 'nigger ball', in South Africa, is a large sweet - the main effect of which was to turn one's teeth black - known in the UK as gob-stopper and presumably 'related' to America's 'nigger baby'; its use in the international hit single 'Ag Plees Daddy' (1962) caused ne'er a ripple in the English consciousness. West Indians themselves have a variety of 'nigger' terms, which may be acceptable between Black people, but are considered highly offensive if used by Whites.
Among them are 'nigger-man' and 'nigger-woman', 'niggergram' or 'nigger-mouth', a malicious, groundless rumor, and 'nigger ten', the mark 'X' made by an illiterate.'
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