Latest on "negro"

[Jonathan Lighter]

The guy wasn't talking about Sterling. He was saying that Sterling was one
of the few who got caught.

BTW, nobody seems to have noted what Sterling's pretty incoherent remarks
were supposed to mean.  What's bothering him seems to be that his rich pals
will snub him if they realize that V isn't "really" a "Latina."

So the nub of the front-page story is: We found another racist rich guy in
America!

Believe It - or Not!!

JL




On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:58 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Latest on "negro"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 7:33 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > "So _you_ can imagine what he must have said when I wasn't there."
> >
>
> Maybe "you" can, but I can't.
>
> I wonder how this loser would have reacted, had he heard my former
> landlord, a black native of Virginia, pronounce "Negro" as [nEgr@] or even
> if he were to hear me pronounce it as "N[I]gro." And, of course, everyone
> here of a certain age can recall that the pronunciation, "N[ij]gro," was
> stigmatized, being eye-phoneticized as "knee-grow" in EBONY et sim. As
> chance would have it, back in the day, only one of my friends, from
> Minneapolis by way of Omaha, used the pronunciation with [ij]. He probably
> was entirely unconscious of the fact that he was possibly the only person
> in all of black St. Louis - or in all of pretty much black anywhere else,
> for that matter - using that pronunciation.
>
> Since this was back in the day of Jim Crow, white St. Louisans used
> "colored" and "nigger." But, After The War, "Negro" was used in the
> Post-Dispatch, the local liberal newspaper "Founded by Joseph Pulitzer,
> Joseph Pulitzer, Junior, Editor and Publisher."
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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>



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