Niggardly is a word synonymous with
stingy and
miserly, and a
niggard (noun) is a
miser. They are both derived from the
Old Norse verb
nigla, meaning "to fuss about small matters". (The English word "niggle" retains the original Norse meaning.) The word is not related to the word "n*gger" though someone unfamiliar with the word "niggardly" might take offense due to the phonetic similarity between the words.
[
edit]
David Howard incident
On
January 15,
1999, David Howard, a white aide to
Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of
Washington, D.C.,
United States, used the word in reference to a
budget. This apparently upset one of his black colleagues (identified by Howard as Marshall Brown), who incorrectly interpreted it as a racial slur and lodged a complaint. As a result, on
January 25 Williams forced Howard to resign.
However, after an internal review into the matter and pressure from the
gay community (of which Howard was a member), the mayor offered Howard the chance to return to his position as Office of the Public Advocate on
February 4. Howard refused but accepted another position with the mayor instead.
The Howard incident led to a national debate in the U.S., in the context of racial sensitivity and
political correctness, on whether use of the word
niggardly should be avoided because of its potential association with the extremely pejorative
racial slur "n*gger"
, despite the entirely separate and unrelated
etymologies of the two words ("n*gger" derives from
niger, the
Latin for "black")..
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060913/ap_on_he_me/vaccine_rumors_1), and/or who set fire to churches and YMCA centers (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913638028&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull & http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3302162,00.html) will believe, and take offense at, just about anything. 
