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) is possible to speak from the seventeenth century onwards of a European, colonial image of "the Hottentot" which bore little relation to any realities of the Khoisan in Africa, and which fed into the usage of "hottentot" as a generalised term of abuse. Correspondingly, the word is "sometimes used as ugly slang for a black person". Use of the derived term "hotnot" was explicitly proscribed in South Africa by 2008. Accordingly, much recent scholarship on the history of colonial attitudes to the Khoisan, or on the European trope of 'the Hottentot', puts the term "Hottentot" in scare quotes. In its