(as in Mark Twain's 1884 book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and in more recent cultural productions (such as Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction) has sparked controversy and ongoing debate. By extension of its derogatory connotation, the word nigger has also been historically used to designate "any person considered to be of low social status" (as in the expression white nigger) or "any person whose behaviour is regarded as reprehensible", and in other national contexts to refer to Aboriginal and Māori people. In some cases, with awareness of the word's offensive connotation, but without intention to cause offense, it can refer to a "a victim of prejudice likened to that endured by African Americans" (as in John Lennon's 1972 song "Woman Is the Nigger of the World"). Etymology and history Early use The variants neger and negar derive from various Romance words for 'black', including the Spanish and Portuguese word (black) and the now-pejorative French . Etymologically, , , , and nigger ultimately derive from , the stem of the Latin ('black'). In its original English-language usage, nigger (also spelled niger) was a word for a dark-skinned individual. The earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574, in a work alluding to "the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnes". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first derogatory usage of the term nigger was recorded two centuries later, in 1775. In the colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in New York under the Dutch and in metropolitan Philadelphia's Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name (Cemetery of the Negro). An early occurrence of neger in American English dates from 1625 in Rhode Island. Lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the neger spelling in place of negro in his 1806 dictionary. 18th and 19th century United States During the late 18th and early 19th century, the word "nigger" also described an actual labor category, which African American laborers adopted for themselves as a social identity, and thus white people used the descriptor word as a distancing or derogatory epithet, as if "quoting black people" and their non-standard language. During the early 1800s to the late 1840s fur trade in the Western United States, the word was spelled "niggur",