Remember the controversy ignited three years ago when a white Washington bureaucrat was fired after using the word "niggardly" in a meeting? Black employees said it sounded so much like the racial slur "nigger" that it didn't matter a jot that the two words were etymologically unrelated. Incredibly, several respected academics and journalists later defended the firing decision, arguing that the mere perception of offensiveness gave sufficient grounds for it. And although the bureaucrat was later reinstated, it is probably fair to say that niggardly -- an old-fashioned word meaning stingy -- is no longer part of white Washington's lexicon.
It was hard, at the time, to imagine that a more self-parodying instance of political correctness could ever emerge. But last month, one did, from no less unlikely a source than the Police Federation of England and Wales. According to numerous reports, the Home Office minister responsible for the police, Mr. John Denham, was misguided enough to use the word "nitty-gritty" in a mid-May speech to a Federation conference. Didn't Mr. Denham know, a policeman in the audience demanded, that nitty-gritty had effectively been banned by some British police forces because of its supposed origin in the 18th-century slave trade (the theory runs that it refers to the lice- or nit-filled debris left in the bottom of slave ships after a voyage)? Reportedly, the audience backed the heckler, agreeing that police would be "disciplined" if they used such a term on the job.
It turned out that Mr. Denham didn't know about nitty-gritty's newly unacceptable status. But perhaps one reason was that the term is not in fact unacceptable. The Oxford English Dictionary and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang both identify it as a product of American Black English, with the earliest written example dating back only to 1956. Its origin remains obscure, but, as one language scholar observes, "It is inconceivable that [the word] could have been around since slave-ship days without somebody writing it down until the mid 20th-century."