It didn't even mean 'black' in the past.uwot wrote:Well, as I'm sure you appreciate by now, that depends on the context. There is no context, that I can imagine, in which n***** just means black and certainly none that I have read or heard. Since n***** has always meant black, in your experience, perhaps you could give an example.vegetariantaxidermy wrote:What does it mean then?
A friend of mine's grandmother was a seamstress, who continued to sew into old age. She was like the Miss Marple of Dressmaking. She would buy her threads from proper haberdashery stores and had a huge collection of threads she had accumulated over the years. We would do 'haberdasher' runs for her, when she was too old to make it to the shops. One day she ran out of a particular shade of brown and my friend was duly asked to "Go to the thread shop and get me some 'ni99er brown'." No amount of explanation could get through to her that this thread would no longer available under that name, despite being "a trade standard" description.
My friend told me it was like arguing with Alf Garnet.
I always wondered how they matched a particular shade of skin colour to a particular shade of thread, given that there's a range of skin tones with every race type. These days we have countless foundations, to match to skin tones, in the makeup market... and guess what?!! In a industry where descriptions have to give some idea of colour, there's not one 'ni99er brown', because the word doesn't denote a shade of skin colour let alone describe black. It's a word that describes a race type, that goes beyond the colour of skin.
Whilst the word may have started off as a simple description, over the years it went from being an insult, to a badge of pride, and back again. It might as well be a 'synonym' for contention!
Words are like people. They are born 'without sin' and can become 'shitty' over the years depending on how they are used. You can never go back to pretending they are 'without sin'. It's a bit like remembering Myra Hindley for what a wonderful child she was.