The word 'Nigger': Richard Pryor & George Carlin

George Carlin - "Euphemisms" from Doin' It Again


Richard Pryor - "Africa" from Live on the Sunset Strip


The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the pejorative French nègre (nigger). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the accusative form of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced [ˈniɡer]; the r is trilled).


according to wikipedia, in the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia’s Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name "Begraafplaats van de Neger" (Cemetery of the Negro); an early US occurrence of neger in Rhode Island, dates from 1625. Among Anglophones, the word nigger was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted “black-skinned”, a common Anglophone usage. Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of nigger without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who uttered the word as contemporary usage. Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported usage, but used the term "negro" when speaking in his own narrative persona.


In the United Kingdom and the Anglophone world, nigger denoted the dark-skinned (non-white) African and Asian peoples colonized into the British Empire, and “dark-skinned foreigners” — in general. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), H. W. Fowler states that applying the word nigger to “others than full or partial negroes” is “felt as an insult by the person described, & betrays in the speaker, if not deliberate insolence, at least a very arrogant inhumanity”; this anti-racist linguistic prescription was deleted from the later editions of Fowler’s Dictionary.


By the 1800s, because nigger had become a pejorative word, in its stead, the term colored became the mainstream alternative to negro and its derived terms. Abolitionists in Boston, Massachusetts, posted warnings to the Colored People of Boston and vicinity. Writing in 1904, jorunalist Clifton Johnson documented the "opprobrious" character of the word, emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "colored." Established as mainstream American English usage, the word colored features in the organizational title of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reflecting the members’ racial identity preference at the 1909 foundation. In the Southern United States, the local American English dialect changes the pronunciation of negro to nigra — a pronunciation most famously used by the Texan-accented US President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69), a proponent of Black American civil rights. Linguistically, in developing American English, in the early editions of A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the neger new spelling in place of negro.


By the late 1960s, the social progress achieved in US society, by such as the Black Civil Rights Movement (1955–68), had legitimized the racial identity word Black as mainstream American English usage to denote black-skinned Americans. In the event, the “political militant” connotations of Black displaced it in favor of the compound blanket term African American — a linguistically compromised usage, because it either inaccurately denotes or excludes non-black African people, (cf. negroid). Moreover, as a compound word, African American resembles the vogue word Afro-American, an early-1970s popular usage; nevertheless, Black is the contemporary racial denomination in the US, and usually is not considered offensive usage. Contemporaneously, the word nigger often is spelled in eye dialect as nigga and niggah, can be used among Black Americans without irony, to either neutral effect or as a sign of solidarity.