Part of Speech: Noun Meaning: A member of the people indigenous
to a land, one of the earliest known inhabitants of a region.
Notes: Since Europeans generally colonize areas inhabited by
nations less advanced than them, many English speakers take
today's Good Word to mean "primitive" and it has become a rather
unPC term in the US. However, there is no implication of
primitivity in this word. The predecessors of the Romans, who
originally created the word, were relatively advanced nations.
Reducing it to abo, as some Australians do in referring to the
aboriginal nations of Australians, is an offensive gesture to be
avoided—which reminds me, aboriginal is the adjective. In Play:
Remember that today's word simply implies peoples who have
inhabited a region since the beginning: "The American aborigines
now are called Native Americans." Nothing wrong with that. An
aborigine is simply someone whose roots go back as far as
records or memory go: "Yale Brown is a European aborigine in
America whose lineage can be trac