A few years ago there was a controversy over the word niggardly — a perfectly innocent word that unfortunately sounds like a racial slur.
Given that controversy, is it safe to use denigrate, which is actually derived from the Latin niger?
Can whole families of words become tainted purely by association?
Best Answer
"Nigger" is pronounced /ˈnigər/ and "denigrate" is pronounced /ˈdeniˌgrāt/. The /nigər/ part is completely missing and the accent isn't in a similar place.
For comparison, "niggardly" is pronounced /ˈnigərdlē/ which does have /nigər/ and the accent is in the same place. So no, denigrate doesn't sound enough like nigger to matter.