A member of Washington, D.C.'s new mayoral staff was compelled to resign after he characterized his own preferred financial management style as "niggardly." Other staff members interpreted the word as a racial epithet, an impression he immediately attempted to correct. The aide, a white male, is expected to be rehabilitated and rehired, perhaps owing in part to his openly gay status.

University of Wisconsin English professor Standish Henning used the same word while teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which led junior English major Amelia Rideau to question him about it after class. He defined the word and thanked her for coming to him. The next time the class met, Henning defined the word again for the entire class, noted that a student had been upset and confused about it, and asked if anyone else had thoughts on the matter. Rideau, the only black person in the class, burst into tears and fled the room, distraught that her professor had repeated the word when she had asked him not to.

Rideau later argued to the faculty senate that the incident underscored the need to revise the university's faculty speech code to punish perpetrators regardless of their intent. Wisconsin had previously adopted a strict student speech code in 1989, which promptly led to complaints about use of the words "redneck" and "primitive dinosaurs," and one student who stole his roommate's ATM card was even said to have been motivated by ethnic tension. The code was struck down as unconstitutional in 1991, revised in 1992, then finally abandoned as unworkable in 1993.

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