"Nigga" untrademarkable?

[Wilson Gray]

Definition 4 in its extended form - "regardless of skin color" (I'm assuming
that the writer means "regardless of a lack of African ancestry," since we
all know that it's not skin color that defines whether one is black or not;
it's whether one is of known, admitted, or claimed sub-Saharan African
ancestry, with the notable exception of the Northern Sudanese, who, for some
reason, are allowed to pass themselves off as non-black "Arabs") - has
pretty much fallen out of use, though Dave Chappelle, among others has been
doing his best to resurrect it, for which I applaud him.

I've never heard "[possessive] nigger" applied to girls or women. But that's
possibly merely a coincidence. "It could happen," to borrow Judy Tenuto's
catchphrase.

-Wilson



On 3/16/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Nigga" untrademarkable?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 3/16/06, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > FWIW, I've heard "nigger" pronounced as [nIgr] by only one black person
> in
> > my entire life. It gave me the same creeps that hearing it pronounced by
> a
> > white person would have. So, I'm not sure what the OED means by
> "deliberate
> > adoption by some speakers." Oh, I see. The reference is only to the
> > development and adoption of the hip-hop spelling, as in "Niggaz Wit
> > Attitude." Never mind.
> >
> > However, hip-hop hasn't "redefined" the word in any sense of the term.
> About
> > 45 years ago, while reading a grammar of Yiddish, I was startled to
> discover
> > that "yid," a word that I had theretofore known only as a term of
> opprobium
> > for a Jew used by white Christians, was defined by this grammmar as "a
> Jew,
> > a man, a person, a human being," with no hint of there being anything
> > insulting about the term. I thought, "Hey, that's almost the same way
> that
> > [nIg@] works! It's an insult only when used by outsiders." I say
> "almost,"
> > because it is possible, under certain circumstances, for one black
> person to
> > insult another black person by calling him a [nIg@]. The so-called
> > "redefinition" has always been part of the definition of [nIg@].
>
> As, indeed, the OED3 entry for "nigger" fully maps out. See these senses:
>
> 1c. Used by blacks as a neutral or favourable term. [from 1831]
> 4. Now chiefly in African-American usage: a person, a fellow
> (regardless of skin colour). [from a1848]
> 5. In African-American usage: (with possessive adjective) a close
> (usually black) friend, a comrade, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a
> spouse. [from 1884]
>
> The issue here seems to be whether there is a clear enough mapping of
> the "nigga" spelling onto these neutral/positive ingroup senses.
> Somehow I doubt the USPTO folks will be interested in the
> sociolinguistic ramifications of orthographic variation...
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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