This from What’s Up With That?

So I drove around just a bit in Guthrie, until I spotted somebody I could ask. It was like a ghost town, but I finally found someone (actually they found me because parked and waited and he rode by on a bike) and I flagged the guy down and asked where I might find some gas. He thought a moment and said “There’s no gas here, nearest is either Ralls or Crosbyton”. I asked where those towns were and he said: “on 82 (pointing west) out past the niggerheads, and then past Dickens”. I said “What? Niggerhead? Is that a town? and he looked at me like I was from another planet (I didn’t tell him I was from California) and he said “no that’s the hills, you’ll see em, and then ya go through Dickens, and Crosbyton, and then Ralls. One of ‘em should have gas.”

I did find gas in Crosbyton, after driving west on 82 through the hills the man described which you can see here in Google maps.

The term “niggerheads” was puzzling and odd, but I figured it was just some local colloquialism, and I didn’t give it another thought…until today.

So after being bombarded with all the news stories about how offensive this term is, and noting that some of the same people doing reporting lambasting Perry over the name of a ranch called “niggerhead” have absolutely no trouble at all calling people like me and the readers of WUWT “deniers” (Think Progress, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, among others) which is also an ugly and offensive term due to the connection to “holocaust deniers”.

So, I thought I’d see what I could find on it. I figured if it was some sort of local colloquial term when I heard it in Texas last spring, I’d find it in older books and maps.

So in my first Google search, amongst all the news stories about Perry, I found my first clue as to why I heard the term,  in Wikipedia:

The term was once widely used for all sorts of things, including products such as soap and chewing tobacco, but most often for geographic features such as hills and rocks.^{[citation needed]} In the U.S., more than hundred “Niggerheads” and other place names now considered racially offensive were changed in 1962 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, but many local names remained unchanged.^[1]

So that explained why the fellow I asked directions from used the term for the hills I’d drive through. The NYT article I cited above also mentions this.

I can understand how it is offensive, and I can certainly see removing it. But I think removing it is going to be a much bigger job than the bloodhounds in the mainstream media thinks. Just look at all the references to the word in science and engineering and geography:

You should read all the places and things named this… very interesting!

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