I was over to Snopes looking for something else, and I found an interesting page on the origin of the word "picnic". Apparently, some people believe it comes from an American expression for a lynching party. As this excerpt demonstrates, it is especially hilarious when this sort of thing is taken seriously on a college campus:

quote:

"One has to wonder at the workings of the mind of someone who'd invent this spurious "pick a nigger" derivation and then set it loose on the Internet. Of course, the fact that it's spurious hasn't deterred those who are determined to find something to be offended by, as noted in this excerpt from a 2000 National Post article:

Meanwhile, things are not peachy on the campus of SUNY/Albany. The university wanted to honour baseball legend Jackie Robinson by having a picnic. But the university's equity office said this must not occur because the word "picnic" referred originally to gatherings held to lynch Blacks. In fact, as one of their own English professors (rather less committed to historical revisionism than RMC's Dr. Robinson) pointed out, the word "picnic" actually comes from a 17th-century French word that denotes a party at which everyone brings food. But Zaheer Mustafa, the equity officer, nevertheless decreed that "picnic" not be used because "the point is — the word offends." So the university decided to call it an "outing." Then, homosexual students took objection to that, and SUNY decided to publicize the event without using any noun to describe it.

H. C.

What foolish people.