Yes,I know that -- which is why I used the translation "black people" in my imaginary scenario of Basil meeting an American girl's parents. But since he used the perfectly polite Russian word негр in parallel with пид@расов, and in a joke about hating racists and blacks, the оскорбительность of пид@расов sort of "bled" into the otherwise normal word негр, in my mind. (It's like when you wash a red shirt with white socks in hot water -- the socks pick up some of the redness).Originally Posted by Lampada
Although, by the way, it was very strange for me at first to hear the word негр from Russians when I lived in Moscow back in 93-94, and until I became accustomed to негр as the "normal" word, I always wanted to say черные люди -- but my Russian friends soon explained to me that this phrase did NOT mean "people of African origin"!
The problem with негр is not that it sounds phonetically like "n*gger", which is only true in the именительном падеже, единственном числе, but that it reminded me of "Negro" -- which was the polite term in America when my parents were kids, but was already old-fashioned by the time I was born in 1971. I grew up saying "blacks" or "black people," and then in the late '80s, "African-American" started to become fashionable.