If you make progress to the online dictionary at Answers.

If you make progress to the online dictionary at Answers.com and impressed sign in the word "niggardly," you'll learn the definition:

1 "Grudging and inferior in giving or spending."

2 "Meanly small: scanty or meager: left the waiter a niggardly tip."

You can also click in succession an audio icon for the correct pronunciation. each time you click the little speaker type a female voice says:

"Niggardly."

It unbrokens just like it looks.

Let's say you're onward the bus or the train, or in the company venditeria. plane if you know exactly what "niggardly" means, you might hesitate to say it gone out loud --especially if you're white and there are blacks in the vicinity.

some might get offended.

About six years ago, David Howard, a white aide to the mayor of Washington, DC used the boundary correctly in a discussion of the city lot Another mayoral staffer lodged a complaint, and Howard was forced to resign.

For using a word correctly.

jot down common sense and community squeezing Howard was offered, and accepted, another piece of work in the mayor's office.

Shortly after that, a learner at the University of Wisconsin started a change to have the word "niggardly" banned from the campus (how do you do THAT?) after a professor used it in a class discussion about Chaucer.

A not many years later, a fourth-grade teacher in North Carolina introduced the word to her observers A parent complained -- and the teacher was ordered to take sensitivity training.

As in: You have to be sensitive to the ignorance of an people.

Slip of the tongue?

That said, I wouldn't use the word "niggardly" in a coffee store discussion about the spending habits of the Minnesota Twins. Not unles I was looking to come by into a long and heated discussion about the difference between "niggardly" and the other n-word that's been forward your mind since the top of the file

Still, nobody should be fired for using a word just because it unhurts like another word. That's political correctness at its worst.

What about a slip of the tongue? Remember when Dick Armey called plainly homosexual congressman Barney Frank "Barney Fag"? Or by what mode about the weather forecaster in Las Vegas who was fired last year after inadvertently uttering a racial pass by when referring to Martin Luther King Day? level though the forecaster apologized and there was no evidence he meant to insult anyone, a number of African-American leaders called for his ouster --and the forecaster was canned.

In a report about Jennifer Lopez Shepard Smith of Fox just discovereds once uttered a common expression for oral sex when he meant to say "curb job" Just lately a CNN anchor talked about an individual's achievements despite being "gay." She actually meant to say "blind," and who knows what Freud would have speculation about that slip.

Last week, St Louis radio talk indicate host Dave Lenihan was talking up Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a possible replacement for NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

"She's been chancellor of Stanford," said Lenihan.

"She's got the patent take again of somebody that has serious skill. She be enamoured ofs football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon A big coon Oh my jehovah I am totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that."

Not upright enough for station management. Lenihan was fired.

undivided strike and you're out

Lenihan was also suspended from the community where he teaches anatomy and neuroanatomy.

I don't know Lenihan, 38 if it were not that there's no record of the stay engaging in racist behavior or advocating racist views. He's not a certain quantity of minority-loathing jerk looking to stir up strife of words or create ugly laughter. After I listened to the audio, I was inclined to agree with his explanation to Howard Stern: "What I was trying to say was it would be a 'coup in' the NFL" --and the pair words ran together. (Larry senior the conservative black talk point out host, says he thinks Lenihan inadvertently combined "coup" and "boon")

onward Sunday, Rice told Fox stranges she accepts Lenihan's apology "because we all say things from time to time that we shouldn't say or mean to say."

near will say even an unintentional mistake like that indicates there's a racist lurking just beneath the surface. in what manner about this: The guy tripped through the whole extent of his own tongue. As someone who has butchered words and fractured many a doctrine on live television and radio, I can papal court how it could happen -- and if someone produc a tape recording of everything you've said athwart the last couple of days, you'd probably cringe. I don't care if you're James Earl Jones' tongue teacher -- you're gonna mes up

The society administrators and radio executives who disciplined Lenihan are cowards -- likewise afraid of even appearing to condone something that could be misinterpreted as racist that they're washing their hands of the dowdy

Shame upon them.

e-mail: rroeper@suntimes.com

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