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<div>At 4:13 PM -0500 2/27/01, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
I might also be interested in words of _non_-offensive origin that<br>
are now sometimes regarded as offensive, e.g.
"niggardly".<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Thanks for any ideas.<br>
</blockquote>
<div>A related category is that of negative words that are mistakenly
identified with more negative/offensive homonyms, such as in a recent
case in which a Connecticut middle school teacher was castigated for
telling her class that "when you ASSUME you make an ASS of U and
ME". The New Haven Register published the
following letter from me on the event:</div>
<div>=========================</div>
<div><font face="Palatino" color="#000000">To the Editor:<br>
<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>I found it curious that the report of the
investigation of the 'ass-u-me' incident at West Haven's Carrigan
Middle School ["No ifs, ands, butts; mom hates 'A'-word,"
Register 4/30/99] never mentions the fact that the 'ass' in question
is the quadruped now usually called a donkey but referred to as an
ass throughout the King James Bible and Shakespeare. (I shudder
to imagine the fate of a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at
Carrigan.) Since the fifteenth century, an ass--in animal or,
metaphorically, human form--is celebrated for stupidity and
stubbornness. The "vulgarity" referred to in the
article, the body-part term 'ass', is a historically distinct item, a
variant of the British 'arse'. While calling someone a horse's
ass may be vulgar, making an ass of someone is not. <br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>The episode in West Haven is
reminiscent of the recent "niggardly" flap in Washington,
in which someone else got into trouble not for what he said, but for
what it sounded like. The gradual disappearance of the
Scriptural 'ass' and the current tendency to shun 'niggardly' are
nice illustrations of taboo avoidance, a kind of linguistic version
of Gresham's Law in which a "bad" word forces out a
"good" (or at least non-obscene) word that sounds like it,
a classic case of guilt by association. It is up to the
representatives of the educational establishment to recognize that in
this case, an ass is not an ass.</font></div>
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