Great, now J. M. Barrie is “racist” too

A post at 123 I Love You triggered some Google-searching…
A piece of old news (from 1999!) that I find incredible and disturbing: Someone was fired for using the world niggardly. Found it, with a commentary, here.

This is a perfectly valid word, widely used in literature, and now they want everyone to stop using it? (Apparently, the rule of the idiots extends to words like masticate and pianist, for which I had to read the explanations to understand what the problems were.)

This is hard to believe/accept. I have similar things to say about the euphemism treadmill.

(Fortunately, there seems to a sliver of good news: Tom Clancy continues to use the word.

Bill Garvin’s Guaranteed Effective All-Occasion Non-Slanderous Political Smear Speech. Apparently it has a real-life (rumour) counterpart: See here and here.