In
February of 1999 an aide of
D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, David Howard, used this word to describe the amount of money allocated to the
district. Due to
ignorance of the masses, who didn't like the fact that this word shares its first four letters with the word
nigger, he was asked to
resign. Williams said "I don't think the use of {that n word} showed the kind of
judgment that I like to see in our top management." For the record, Williams is
black, Howard is
white.
Howard was reinstated after someone got clever enough to look up the word in a dictionary.
A few weeks later Howard was re-hired.
Niggardly means miserly, and comes from the middle english words 'nig' and 'ignon'.
Source: http://www.adversity.net/special/niggardly.htm