an old-fashioned word from the 19th century often used by women and high class society back then to describe a negro,
originally a negro slave; a word most often used by southern women and effete gentlemen who thought the more commonly accepted word nigger (back then) was a bit low-class and
pedestrian; a polite word for a
nigger slave memorialized in song by Stephen C. Foster's tunes like O Susanna, My Old Kentucky Home, and Old Folks at Home.