• PatMustard@feddit.uk
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    9 months ago

    Snickering”, as far as I can tell is just the American version of “sniggering”. I can’t track down the etymology of the split and so I can’t see any huge mentions of “it sounded a bit racist so we changed it” but I guess it seems plausible given things like “titbit” being changed to “tidbit”.

    While someone saying “niggardly” is a bit suspicious given that it’s a pretty archaic word that most people haven’t even heard of, “sniggering” is a pretty normal word to use in Britain. I imagine if some racist wants to start using it as a bit of coded bigotry they could, American-branded homophobia has already ruined the word “fags” to describe your cigs!

      • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        Probably your lemmy instance censoring certain words. I don’t see “removed” in their comment

        • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It’s so weird because it’s not censoring “niggardly”, only “sremoveding”.

          Edit: Oh right, “niggardly” doesn’t contain the whole N-word inside itself.

        • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Very frustrating to see such stupidity in Lemmy.

          It’s like how the game Dark Souls would censor any word containing “nig”, and unintentionally made anyone naming themselves “Knight whatever” look racist. In a game full of knights.

    • FanciestPants@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I believe the commenter is referring to a spelling of “snickering” that replaces the ‘ck’ with ‘gg’. I don’t have any sources to cite, but vaguely recall seeing this spelling years ago.

        • FanciestPants@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I intended to respond to your comment, but certainly may have misunderstood the comment as well. What I meant was only that I thought Foggy was suggesting the potential racist sounding version of “snickering” that replaces the ck with gg, rather than suggesting that sremoveding sounds potentially racist.

          I wasn’t familiar with the word sremoveding before, but find the etymology fascinating and appreciate getting to learn about it.