I've refrained from commenting here, but I did a search on the etymology of the word. It was derived from the Spanish and Portuguese word "negro" meaning "black". An alternative word for African Americans was the English word, "Black", used by Thomas Jefferson in his
Notes on the State of Virginia. Among Anglophones, the word was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted "black-skinned", a common Anglophone usage. Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of ------ without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella The N of the 'Narcissus' (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who used the word as contemporary usage. Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported usage, but used the term "negro" when speaking in his own narrative persona.
During the fur trade of the early 1800s to the late 1840s in the Western United States, the word was spelled with a "ur" at the end and is often recorded in literature of the time. George Fredrick Ruxton often included the word as part of the "mountain man" lexicon, and did not indicate that the word was pejorative at the time. It was evidently similar to the modern use of dude, or guy. This passage from Ruxton's Life in the Far West illustrates a common use of the word in spoken form—the speaker here referring to himself: "Travler, marm, this ------'s no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!" It was not used as a term exclusively for blacks among mountain men during this period, as Indians, Mexicans, and Frenchmen and Anglos alike could be a "------". There was also a time when the word meant, "A person who has no value to his race, a bum."
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Have PV-500 & willing to travel.
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