"Nigga" untrademarkable?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

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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