| 单词 | niggardly |
| 例句 | niggardly adjective 1.•a niggardly person:cheap, mean, miserly, parsimonious, close-fisted, penny-pinching, cheeseparing, grasping, ungenerous, illiberal | informal stingy, tight, tightfisted. ANT generous. 2.•niggardly rations:meager, inadequate, scanty, scant, skimpy, paltry, sparse, insufficient, deficient, short, lean, small, slender, poor, miserable, pitiful, puny | informal measly, stingy, pathetic, piddling. ANT lavish, abundant.WORD NOTE niggardly I was once giving a speech to a group of students in South Carolina, and happened to make reference to the niggardly pay raise that was then being offered to a group of local strikers—whereupon three members of the audience, two of them white and one black, walked out in evident protest. Much the same had happened in Washington, DC, a month or so before: a local civil servant was excoriated for having used the same word, one which, to some ill-educated members of his audience, was deemed to be—since it had a similarity of sound—racist and offensive. Of course, most users of this book will, ipso facto, be educated and liberally rounded people, and even if unaware of the precise etymology will know that this synonym for "parsimonious" has no connection whatsoever with the presently offensive and generally unusable word nigger (my caveat here refers only to the accepted and acceptable use of nigger within some racially and socially circumscribed communities). Niggardly almost certainly comes from a Scandinavian term for "a stingy person," and it is, so far as is known, ethnically and chromatically untainted. So even if only to annoy the ignorant and pedantic watchdogs of correctness, this word should, I think, be used frequently. There is a much nobler reason to do so also, of course: it is a quite splendid-sounding and -looking word, easy on both the eye and the ear. — SWConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage. |
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