Sunday, January 16, 2011

Pejoration

A few years ago, the Hamilton County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities removed the word "retarded" from their name.  This was accompanied by a symbolic demolition of the "R" from the MRDD sign in front of their headquarters with the intention of erasing the so-called R-word from the language.

Let's face it, we can make any word an insult.  Special Education veterans will remember when "retarded" was introduced to replace such terms as "moron," "idiot," and "imbecile."  Linguists who study the way meanings evolve refer to this kind of change as perjoration.  In this process, words with a neutral or even positive connotation acquire negative meanings.  It's hardly new.  A "villain" was once merely a farm-worker and "awful" was a good thing, full of awe.

In economics there is a principal called Gresham's Law which says that bad money drives out good.  Always push overs for a turn of phrase, linguists have coined the tongue-in-cheek Gresham's Law of Semantic Change: bad meanings drive out good.  Once a word is used as an insult, that usage will eventually beat out any other meaning.

What does this mean for those well meaning attempts to fix society's ills by changing the way we speak?  I think the punk band NOFX said it best: "soap shoved in your mouth to cleanse the mind."  Until attitudes change, you can feed a dictionary worth of euphemisms, synonyms and politically correct vocabulary into the meat grinder of prejudice without so much as slowing down the gears.

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