Hottentot (racial term) in an ethnic sense. From the eighteenth century onwards, the term "hottentot" was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to "barbarian" or "cannibal". In its ethnic sense, it had developed connotations of savagery and primitivism soon already in the seventeenth century: colonial depictions of the Hottentots (Khoikhoi) in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygia and elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian"; and a perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial". Thus it
Hottentot (racial term) been known to the seventeenth-century settlers, once often referred to as "Bosjesmans" in Dutch and "Bushmen" in English). The term "Hottentot" remained in use as a technical ethnic term in anthropological and historiographical literature into the late 1980s, and the 1996 edition of the "Dictionary of South African English" merely says that 'the word "Hottentot" is seen by some as offensive and Khoikhoi is sometimes substituted as a name for the people, particularly in scholarly contexts'. Yet by the 1980s, because of the racist connotations discussed below, it was increasingly been seen as too derogatory and offensive to be used