Stephen Vassallo is not a man who usually talks out of the back of his neck, so when he writes that the word niggardly is being dropped in polite conversation he presumably has some evidence to support his claim (“Daphne and GTS”, Letters, 9 September).

He’ll forgive me if I cast doubt on that.

The word is used so infrequently in any type of conversation that it would be nigh on impossible for anybody to notice if it was being used less often. He says it is now being replaced by words like parsimonious. Oh, really? I wonder when he last heard that word used in conversation, polite or otherwise, in Malta, England or elsewhere, and how anybody established that the speaker had opted for parsimonious in preference to niggardly.

In short, with respect, it may be his wishful thinking but it is total nonsense.

If the PC fascists want to ban words like niggardly in order, as he says, “to leave as little room for misinterpretation as possible,” they should be slapped down and given a brief lesson in etymology. There is no room for misinterpretation, other than by pompous idiots trying to make themselves look clever, while actually displaying their total ignorance and misunderstanding. And yes: we know that there is no shortage of people like that.

Niggardly has nothing to do with race or what people are starting to call the N-word, and everything to do with the verb to niggle, with the noun niggle, and the adjective niggling.

Hence you can leave a niggardly (very mean) tip in a restaurant, you can niggle (argue in boring detail) about the bill, and have a niggle (a petty quibble) with your friends about the service. Or you can have niggling arguments about ridiculous attempts to remove totally inoffensive words from the vocabulary.

Shakespeare used niggard in its proper context in (I think) Macbeth; the word does not appear in Othello.

What next? Should we perhaps drop the word snigger from “polite” conversation? To leave as little room for misinterpretation as possible, I mean.

Revel Barker

GHAJNSIELEM