By Dr. Karen Wieland and James Currie
And as promised, for better and for worse. In our last word meaning post, we talked about amelioration, when a word’s meaning changes over time from negative to positive. Now, let’s talk a little about the exact opposite – pejoration, when a word’s meaning goes in the other – downhill – direction, from positive to negative. In linguistics, this process can also be called deterioration or degeneration.
Pejoration
First, about the word pejoration. It’s pronounced PEDGE-uh-RA-tion, and like amelioration, it rhymes with nation, not ration.
The word pejoration means, literally, ‘worsening’, from the Latin peior, meaning worse. Where’d that ‘j’ come from? From Medieval Latin, which wrote the ‘y’ consonant sound with a ‘j’ instead of an ‘i’ – peior=>pejor – perhaps to avoid confusion, and, then, through Old French where ‘j’ was pronounced, well, like our ‘j’ — ‘PAY-yor’=>’PAY-jer’.
From good meaning to bad meaning. Seems a bit silly, doesn’t it. So let’s look at ‘silly’ as a case in point.
Some Examples of Pejoration
Silly
The root from which our Modern English word ‘silly’ comes from is an old Germanic root. In fact, Modern German still uses the word (‘selig’) with its original meaning (holy, blessed).
In Old English, the adjective ‘gesælig’ meant ‘happy, prosperous’ and was (pretty clearly) related to the word ‘sæl’, meaning ‘happiness’.
Over the next 400 or so years, the meaning changed gradually, from ‘happy’ to ‘blessed’ to ‘pious’ to ‘innocent’ (around 1200), to ‘harmless’. By the end of the 1200s, the meaning had shifted negatively to ‘pitiable’ and by 1300 to ‘weak’. The form of the word had simplified as well, dropping the ‘ge-’ prefix and becoming ‘seli’ or ‘seely’.
Over the years, the meaning continued to downgrade and by the 1570s, it meant ‘feeble in mind, foolish’.
Censure
In Classical Latin times, if one wanted to appraise or assess something or someone, they would do so using the verb ‘censēre. The person who did the appraising was called the ‘censor’ while the act of appraising or assessing was the ‘censūra’.
Many, many words entered English from Latin during the Renaissance, with the expanded vocabulary that came with growth in the religious, legal and scientific fields. So ‘censūra’ came to English in the late 1300s as censure, first on the religious side meaning ‘judgment, opinion’ then moving to the legal field as a ‘judicial sentence’.
It’s important to note, that both of these meanings were neutral in tone: they imply neither a positive/favorable judgment, nor a negative/unfavorable one.
But by the beginning of the 17th century, the primary meaning of the word had depreciated to a general sense of “finding fault, an expression of condemnation.”
Lewd
Another good example of pejoration is the word ‘lewd’.
We start again in Old English in the religious space with the word ‘læwede’, meaning ‘nonclerical, unlearned’ because back then most education was restricted to the wealthy and the Church.
By Middle English, the spelling had changed a bit to ‘leued’ with the meaning settled on ‘unlettered, uneducated’. By the late 1300s, the meaning had depreciated to ‘coarse, vile, lustful’ where it remains today.
An interesting side story is the similar fate of the word ‘vulgar’, which started in Latin as a general reference to the ‘common people’ (read: not nobility), and, well, we all know how that word turned out.
Next Post
So far we have seen meaning changes in pairs working in opposing directions: general/specific and better/worse. In a future post or two, we want to talk about some really … weird … words. Words that are their own opposites.
But next, Dr. Wieland wants to write about how she fell in love with Latin and became a Latinist!
References
Nordquist, Richard. “Pejoration in Language.” ThoughtCo, Aug. 29, 2020, thoughtco.com/pejoration-word-meanings-1691601.
Harper, Douglas (2021). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved on December 12, 2023, from etymonline.com
Copyright © 2024 by Karen M. Wieland, Ph.D and James E. Currie, Jr.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.