Is there anything wrong with the word “denigrate”?

A few years ago there was a controversy over the word niggardly — a perfectly innocent word that unfortunately sounds like a racial slur.

Given that controversy, is it safe to use denigrate, which is actually derived from the Latin niger?

Can whole families of words become tainted purely by association?

"Nigger" is pronounced /ˈnigər/ and "denigrate" is pronounced /ˈdeniˌgrāt/. The /nigər/ part is completely missing and the accent isn't in a similar place.

For comparison, "niggardly" is pronounced /ˈnigərdlē/ which does have /nigər/ and the accent is in the same place. So no, denigrate doesn't sound enough like nigger to matter.

Yes, it's certainly possible for whole classes of words to become taboo just because of sound-association. It's going on right now, for better or worse.

However, I doubt that denigrate will fall victim to this. In the first place, it doesn't sound very much like nigger or any derivative. Furthermore, you have to be fairly conversant in Latin to realize that the -nigr- part of denigrate has anything to do with "black", which prevents the association between the words from becoming strong or widespread enough to incur the taboo.

I've never made that connection. Is it racially offensive to say that someone is "blacklisted" or that he has done something to "blacken his name"? Maybe go ahead and use it?