Pejorative

Etymology

The word pejorative is derived from a Late Latin past participle stem of peiorare, meaning "to make worse", from peior "worse".

Pejoration and melioration

In historical linguistics, the process of an inoffensive word becoming pejorative is a form of semantic drift known as pejoration. An example of pejoration is the shift in meaning of the word silly from meaning that a person was happy and fortunate to meaning that they are foolish and unsophisticated. The process of pejoration can repeat itself around a single concept, leaping from word to word in a phenomenon known as the euphemism treadmill, for example as in the successive pejoration of the terms bog-house, privy-house, latrine, water closet, toilet, bathroom, and restroom (US English).

When a term begins as pejorative and eventually is adopted in a non-pejorative sense, this is called melioration or amelioration. One example is the shift in meaning of the word nice from meaning a person was foolish to meaning that a person is pleasant. When performed deliberately, it is described as reclamation or reappropriation. An example of a word that has been reclaimed by portions of the community that it targets is queer, which began being re-appropriated as a positive descriptor in the early 1990s by activist groups. However, due to its history and – in some regions – continued use as a pejorative, there remain LGBT individuals who are uncomfortable with having this term applied to them. The use of the racial slur nigger (specifically the -a variant) by African Americans is often viewed as another act of reclamation, though some people of sub-Saharan African descent object to the use of the word under any circumstances.

References

References

1. "Pejorative". Dictionary.com.
2. "Pejorative (adj.)". [[Online Etymology Dictionary]].
3. Horobin, Simon. (March 31, 2021). "Five words that don't mean what you think they do".
4. Stollznow, Karen. (2020-08-11). "Ableist Language and the Euphemism Treadmill". Cambridge University Press.
5. Bell, Vicars Walker. (1953). "On Learning the English Tongue". Faber & Faber.
6. Nordquist, Richard. (3 October 2019). "Amelioration (word meanings)".
7. Brontsema, Robin. (2004-06-01). "A Queer Revolution: Reconceptualizing the Debate Over Linguistic Reclamation". Colorado Research in Linguistics.
8. Perlman, Merrill. (2019-01-22). "How the word 'queer' was adopted by the LGBTQ community".
9. Druhan, Colin. (2019-03-06). "Our complicated relationship with the term queer".
10. Higson, Rachel. (2017-09-28). "Considering the N-Word: To Reject or Reclaim?".