Does "renege" have any racial overtones, or is it otherwise offensive?

I used the word "renege" in a meeting the other day (something like, "the vendor decided to renege on their offer of shipping replacement SAN disks"), and got a few wide eyes.

My supervisor sat me aside just today and told me that my word choice has racial overtones, especially in mixed company, and that I should avoid using it.

I've heard that "niggardly" is somewhat taboo, but should I stop using "renege" as well? Is there a less offensive word I can use?

Solution 1:

Although I strongly agree with the answers given so far — no racial overtones to renege — you must bear in mind that the kind of people who frequent this site are linguistically aware and, therefore, not necessarily reflective of your supervisor or your work environment.

What you’ve stumbled across in your supervisor is the “eggcorn” phenomenon, where speakers who are (partially) ignorant of some word give it a false etymology that accords with their (partial) understanding of its meaning. (For instance, acorn sounds like it’s made up of corn and a. But what’s an a? In dialects where egg rhymes with vague, it’s easy to reinterpret this as the (eponymous) compound eggcorn, as acorns are vaguely egg-shaped.)

In the case of renege, I bet your supervisor thought, “It means something negative, so it must be related to the racist derivatives of negro.” (As you correctly point out, the same thing has happened to niggardly, which is as stigmatized by some speakers as the derivatives of negro are.)

As a linguistic process, though, the phenomenon is ancient. The word bridegroom is a case in point. Historically, it ought to be bridegoom: the goom, ‘man’ (cognate with the hum part of human), of the bride. But, when English eventually lost the Anglosaxon root guma, bridegoom ceased to make intuitive sense to English speakers and was replaced by the current, somewhat bizarre compound suggesting that women marry stablehands.

Eggcorn etymologies of the sort you’ve encountered occur at the phrasal or idiomatic level too. Black magic (as opposed to white magic) and dark day are felt by some to have racist overtones or implications (Ossie Davis famously makes this case in “The English language is my enemy”, for instance) — though advocates of this view generally (universally?) ignore the fact that black and white have the same metaphorical extensions (bad versus good) in traditional Igbo and Luganda proverbs. An op ed in the The New York Times (from 1988) consequently urges prudence, or self-censorship, here.

So, though you are right, you should be aware of people’s propensity towards misconceptions in this domain.

Solution 2:

This reminds me of when my friend and I were 8 years old or so, and he got all upset when I said that he was tittering, because he knew he'd get in trouble if his mom heard us saying tit.

I say educate them on the word, its meaning, and its roots. Then use it. Don't let 8-year-old-level keyword-driven knee-jerk reactions force you to elide a perfectly good word from your vocabulary.

Ask your boss if he thinks there are no tables in the Notables product line. Ask him if he thinks that pistachios have piss in them and whether Aster is aware her posterior is in motion. Ask him if he thinks doing something by fiat means driving around in a car. Check if he thinks despicable, The Whopper™, and nip it in the bud also have racist overtones. Will you be accused of sexual harassment if you speak of dictators? Will your boss be offended if you call an overweight coworker indefatigable? Do I wish to unfairly marginalize certain people when I discuss propagation?

The cure for ignorance is education. Do it. Save the world from them. Don't let them destroy the language.

Key for the less obvious examples above:

Aster: ass stir
despicable, The Whopper™, nip it in the bud: each contains a common single-syllable racial slur
dictators: dick is slang for the male sexual organ
indefatigable: contains the word fat in it
propagation: gay shun