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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. [3]
The term literally means '[person/people] of Jesus' in India and Pakistan, but in the latter country, Isai has been pejoratively used by non-Christians to refer to 'street sweepers' or 'labourers', occupations that have been held by Christian workers of Dalit ancestry. [13]
Cracker: In the United States, the use of "cracker" as a pejorative term for a white person does not come from the use of bullwhips by whites against slaves in the Atlantic slave trade.
Lists of pejorative terms for people include: . List of ethnic slurs. List of ethnic slurs and epithets by ethnicity; List of common nouns derived from ethnic group names
The term antonym (and the related antonymy) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
Polari, a jargon that began in European ports and evolved into a shorthand used in gay subcultures, influences much of today's slang in words like "zhuzh," "drag," "camp" and "femme."
A contronym is alternatively called an autantonym, auto-antonym, antagonym, [3] [4] enantiodrome, enantionym, Janus word (after the Roman god Janus, who is usually depicted with two faces), [4] self-antonym, antilogy, or addad (Arabic, singular didd).
A pejorative suffix is a suffix that attaches a negative meaning to the word or word-stem preceding it. There is frequent overlap between this and the diminutive form.. The pejorative suffix may add the sense of "a despicable example of the preceding," as in Spanish -ejo (see below).