Heard at work: We got a pretty good price because my husband "jewed the guy down".

[Ms. Toad]

47. Occasionally, people use a phrase without recognizing its meaning

A few years ago, there was a debate here about the perjorative "Spaz." Despite the similarity of the perjorative to spastic (e.g. the movements of someone with cerebral palsy), a lot of people denied it was derived from spastic (or offensive).

The source of "jewed" is obvious to me - but there are other things that are obvious that people say incorrectly in a way that indicates they have incorporated the phrase in their vocabulary, but not the meaning. For all intensive purposes - for example -is a frequent misstatement (and near homonym) of for all intents and purposes. Intensive makes absolutely no sense - and the person using it is using it correctly as if they were actually saying "for all intents and purposes." So I could imagine that if the speaker in this case wrote the phrase down they might write, "jude the guy down," still meaning talked him down in price - without realizing that the word was jewed, not jude, and came from a stereotype of jews.

(The N-word is pretty blatant - so I wouldn't ask a white person using the N-word what they meant. But I might ask a person using a phrase where the origin is less clear and the word is a homonym of the word used offensively - to alert them if they would not have used a derogative word had they been conscious that is what they were using.)