Jump to content

Pejorative

From Wikiquote
Chileans often pride themselves on being "the English of South America" or "the Switzerland of South America", yet in the football stadiums and fanzines their Bolivian and Peruvian call them "Mapochos", a pejorative corruption of Mapuches.

Pejorative, also terms of abuse, disparagement, or derogatory, is a word or grammatical form of expression that expresses contempt, criticism, hostility, disregard and/or disrespect.

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

[edit]
Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

[edit]
  • Operation Wetback used in 1954 is the code name derived from the derogatory term wetback, or mojado, which literally translated means "wet." The pejorative word mojado is used to describe an individual who crosses the border illegally, because often the crossing entails physically getting across the Rio Grande River, which means the individual emerges on the other side wet.
  • There may be exceptional circumstances when anonymous pejorative quotes paraphrase anonymous pejorative quotes
    • Editorial code in: Stephen Pritchard " The readers' editor on… anonymous sources When is a spokesman a 'spad' - and how is the reader to know the difference?"
Whistle Blowers on Wall Street - The employee will never denounce his superiors if society continues to treat him as a whistle-blower (pejorative connotation in the business world), a tattletale or sneak (pejorative connotation at school), an informer (pejorative connotation from the German occupation), a stool pigeon (pejorative connotation in the Soviet Union), or a squealer (pejorative connotation from the underworld). - Jacques Cory
...the racial slur nigger is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act... -Adam M. Croom
There seems to be justification for assuming that Theophrastus employed the term in a pejorative sense of "pedant", but we should adhere to the positive meaning “scholastic”. -W. Fortenbaugh
  • Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur nigger is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act... Although I have considered not even mentioning such a derogatory term as nigger in the first place, I chose it because on the one hand there is a substantive literature on the term upon which to draw to aid in the analysis of slurs in general, and on the other hand, this term highlights the fact that slurs possess a forcefully potent affective component that is clearly a key aspect to their employment.
    • Adam M. Croom in: Slurs, ScienceDirect
  • We reach the second half of the twentieth century still tumbling with pros and cons of using the notion of primitive. Some consider it to be quite acceptable, together with barbarism, pagan, and savage, because nothing pejorative is found in their ]]etymological]] origins: Primitive, pagan, and savage, are, then, perfectly respectable words. But primate is the most widely disseminated, in the most recognizable forms, in major languages and has, even today, the least pejorative associations, signifying merely a prior state of affairs, a relative sense of origins.

G - L

[edit]
... Being hard to distinguish amongst true flax until it flowered it was awarded a pejorative affiliation with toads.
That reference to Holy Rollers — a possibly pejorative term that certainly won't endear him to the religious right — is one reason O’Reilly can be such a fascinating figure to some gay activists.
Fan is a widely admired figure in Britain, at least among men. Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere. -Simon Kuper.
  • We understand the inappropriateness of these pejorative quotes; nonetheless, although distasteful, we believe that the reactions of these unfortunate spirits interned in sanatorium-like or purgatorial regions must appear in the present account so that we may not evade the truth.

M - R

[edit]
The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started. - Christopher Nolan.
They called him mountebank and sorcerer, fakir in a pejorative sense of the Petro Asson, and other names associated with cheap charlatans who would raise the dead for 15 dollars and change... - Ishmael Reed.
  • The pejorative term 'political correctness' was adapted to express disapproval of the enlargement of etiquette to cover all people, in spite of this being a principle to which all Americans claim to subscribe.
    • Judith S. Marin in: Christopher Caldwell Behaving Ourselves, The New York Times, 8 December 2012
  • The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

S - Z

[edit]
Scholars who study cults (or, as many prefer to call them by the less pejorative term, “New Religious Movements”) explain that there is no simple answer to the question “Who joins cults?” The only consistent variable seems to be age—young people are likely to join the cults than older people.
The word that came to denote this set of characteristics in parliamentary propaganda was, of course, "cavalier" and it is … By the early seventeenth century, it had acquired pejorative connotations — "a poor beggerly knight that hath nothing but his sword and cloak and a knight of drawen sword that an excellent whoremonger or a notable wincher.” - Robert Wilcher.
  • A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.
[edit]
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about: