the 'n' words

[mkenuk]

A serious question;
One thing that has often puzzled me: why is the word 'negro' classed as uncommon, while the (to me, anyway) much more offensive term 'nigger' is common?
I know that Chi's policy is to treat all taboo words, of whatever ilk, simply as words, so this is unlikely to have anything to do with being PC.
I can't imagine that either of these words is unfamiliar to any Chi player, so might I suggest that both words should be common?

MK

[ensiform]

I aver that negro is used much less frequently than nigger, the United Negro College Fund notwithstanding.  It has little to do with offensiveness.  One has slipped into the past and one hasn't.  Pickaninny and octaroon are also uncommon.

[mkenuk]

I aver that negro is used much less frequently than nigger, ....one has slipped into the past and one hasn't..

I'm not sure that current usage should be the sole guide to whether a word is common or not, for the purposes of Chi. Videotape is now obsolete as far as most people are concerned; we watch a movie on DVD, Blu-Ray or via some compressed format. That doesn't stop the word 'videotape' being used in Chi - it was the keyword in a game a few weeks ago.

My contention is that because both the words are familiar to nearly all Chi players, through literature and films if nothing else, they should both be classed as common. How many Chi solvers (especially in the US) have never read 'To Catch a Mockingbird'? Novels such as this, not to mention the works of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison et al are going to keep these two words in the minds of people for all time.

MK

[ensiform]

True, current usage shouldn't be the sole standard of how a word is classified.  Though I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was, either.  I take your point that "negro" is well known through literature and movies.

[Alan W]

This issue has been raised a couple of times since this discussion. In a 2016 thread I explained why I thought negro should continue to be treated as a rare word:

Nowadays the word Negro, when it is used at all, is almost invariably written with a capital N. However, it wasn't always so, as can be seen in this chart from the Google Ngram Viewer:



The lower case version seems to have been standard up until the early 20th century. The word negro is written that way in books by authors such as Edith Wharton, Henry James, Jack London and Upton Sinclair (although the word has a capital N in the Project Gutenberg version of The Jungle). As late as the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg used the lower-case N in "Howl":

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

The process that resulted in Negro being usually written with a capital N was described in a 2014 article by Lori L Tharps in the New York Times. In the 1920s W. E. B. Du Bois started campaigning for the word to be capitalised, on the grounds that all other words naming groups of people were written with an initial capital. In 1929, after an argument, the Encyclopedia Britannica agreed to use the capital N when it printed an article submitted by Du Bois. In 1930 the New York Times announced that it would begin writing the word as Negro, saying:

It is not merely a typographical change, it is an act in recognition of racial respect for those who have been generations in the 'lower case.'

The issue had been raised earlier, as indicated in this quote from a 1906 Harper's Weekly article cited by the OED:

Professor Booker T. Washington, being politely interrogated..as to whether negroes ought to be called 'negroes' or 'members of the colored race' has replied that it has long been his own practice to write and speak of members of his race as negroes, and when using the term 'negro' as a race designation, to employ the capital 'N'.

Of course the word Negro itself has come to be viewed with disfavour since the 1960s, but was the generally used term before then, and can be heard in speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.

So negro is accepted in Chihuahua because it has sometimes been written without a capital letter, but it is classed as rare because it is seldom written that way now. Whether that reasoning should stand is a question I'll look into another day.

Soon after, I said:

I've concluded that negro should remain a rare word, given that it has normally been written with a capital N for several decades, and some players, not knowing the word's history outlined above, would assume it's not a playable word at all.