n-word

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:56 PM -0500 12/10/01, Duane Campbell wrote:
>On Sat, 8 Dec 2001 23:22:58 -0600 Mike Salovesh
><t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU> writes:
>>  Some years ago, I got in terrible trouble because I said the "n-word"
>>  in
>>  what I innocently thought was an entirely appropriate way.  WARNING:
>>  I use
>>  that word in what follows
>
>There may be earlier citations, but I had never heard the euphemism, "the
>N-word," prior to the O.J. Simpson trial. I suspect that the media
>coverage is what brought that into common parlance.

Curiously, this would chronologically privilege the very different
use of "n-word" within the linguistics of negative concord and
polarity--referring to negative indefinites like Spanish "nada",
"nadie", "nunca" and their cross-linguistic analogues, as originally
coined by Itziar Laka in her 1990 MIT dissertation.  That, of course,
was not a euphemism for anything.

larry