| In February of 1999 an aide of D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, David Howard, used this word to describe the amount of money allocated to the district. Due to ignorance of the masses, who didn't like the fact that this word shares its first four letters with the word nigger, he was asked to resign. Williams said "I don't think the use of {that n word} showed the kind of judgment that I like to see in our top management." For the record, Williams is black, Howard is white.
Howard was reinstated after someone got clever enough to look up the word in a dictionary.
A few weeks later Howard was re-hired.
Niggardly means miserly, and comes from the middle english words 'nig' and 'ignon'.
Source: http://www.adversity.net/special/niggardly.htm
| 
