I'm going to give John from Hull the benefit of the doubt. I stand by my above post in which I apologized for my inference that Guest was him and I also PMed him.

Wolfgang, I went thread you provided a link to, and was surprised that I had posted to that thead..I had forgotted that I had done so.
I believe that this excerpt of my comments then is still relevent now:

As an African American, I commend posters on this thread for the overall sensitivity of your comments.

Since I have been reading Mudcat threads, I've often wondered how different the responses to threads, and, for that matter, the topic threads would be if there were more people of [acknowledged?}African descent and more people of color who posted here. I think that such participation would add to the richness of the conversation.
Notwithstanding my wish that Mudcat would be more racially diverse, IMHO, Mudcat can't be beat for the posting of historical information/source material on folk music, including children's rhymes {which are my primary area of interest}.

I've already written in other Mudcat threads about my aversion to the historical and contemporary use by African Americans and others of the "N word". So I won't dwell on that here, but will say that though that individual and group referent was frequently used during pre-Civil War times by some slave and free African Americans {particularly free and freed economically "lower class" African Americans}, there were many other Africans & other people of African descent in the United States and elsewhere then {as now} who found {find}the term offensive...

end of quote.

And, BTW, the nations Niger and Nigeria are named after the great river Niver, and are not prounced like the dreaded "N" word..

I have heard Niger pronounced KNEE-jeer or NIGH-jeer, but never NIG-ger. Nigeria is pronounced nigh-JEER-ree-ah.

Not that any of this matters to folks who just want to have some fun with words or who haven't moved past the use of racially derogatory terms [and I'm talkin about Black people here too..]