• @[email protected]
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    85 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!

    • @[email protected]
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      -15 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            25 months ago

            I didn’t discover that lemmy.world has a Scunthorpe Problem auto-censor editing your comments for you (and mine, but only if you’re reading them on lemmy.world) so I’m actually not sure if you’re making a joke or are unaware of what’s happening!