Ameliorated words of offensive origin

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:13 PM -0500 2/27/01, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
>I might also be interested in words of _non_-offensive origin that
>are now sometimes regarded as offensive, e.g. "niggardly".
>
>Thanks for any ideas.
>
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:
=========================
To the Editor:

        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.
        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.
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