Pejorative Quotes

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.

The rational approach start from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.

So, the word wild here is not used in its modern pejorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means to live a natural life, one in which the criatura, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries. These words, wild and woman, cause women to remember who they are and what they are about. They create a metaphor to describe the force which funds all females. They personify a force that women cannot live without.

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective 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 hightest 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.

I had always thought crying was a sing of failure. In our culture we're made to feel ashmed of showing our feelinngs, of being vulnerable. If a woman cries, she's crazy, emotional, has PMS, or whatever the most current pejorative dismissive term is.

Cultural differences are real, and cannot be talked away by using pejorative terms such as “stereotypes” or “racism.

Misogyny is simply a symptom of how stupid and self-serving we all are. As is racism. As is any outlook that lumps people into pejorative categories (like ‘neckbeards’), that urges or insinuates hatred of people based on simplistic identifications.

The pejorative parigüayo, Watchers agree, is a corruption of the English neologism "party watcher." The word came into common usage during the First American Occupation of the DR, which ran from 1916-1924. (You didn't know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don't worry, when you have kids they won't know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.)

What is a princess, and what is a queen? Why is the princess often a pejorative description of a certain type of woman, and the word queen hardly ever applied to women at all? A princess is a girl who knows that she will get there, who is on her way perhaps but is not yet there. She has power but she does not yet wield it responsibly. She is indulgent and frivolous. She cries but not yet noble tears. She stomps her feet and does not know how to contain her pain or use it creatively. A queen is wise. She has earned her serenity, not having had it bestowed on her but having passed her tests. She has suffered and grown more beautiful because of it. She has proved she can hold her kingdom together. She has become its vision. She cares deeply about something bigger than herself. She rules with authentic power.

I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity.

We incline towards feelings of isolation and persecution because we have an unrealistic sense of how much difficulty is normal. We panic too easily, as we misjudge the meaning of our troubles. We are lonely – not that we have no one to talk to, but because those around us can’t appreciate our travails with sufficient depth, honesty and patience. This is partly because the ways we show the pain of our choppy relationships, envy or unfulfilled ambitions can easily seem pejorative and insulting. We suffer and we feel that this suffering lacks dignity

(In reference to swingers) In the meantime, if you wish to declare yourself polyamorous, get used to the fact that the confusion is gong to remain as a pejorative. Sure, clear up the misunderstanding as much as you can, but don't put too much effort into setting yourself up as a "good", responsible, community-oriented polyamorist by contrasting yourself to the "bad" swingers - they may not be your siblings, but they're definitely your cousins.

Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor — closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes.

During this investigation, I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze. It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from it's field of vision...The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view” that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments— scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. ” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language.

But some people don’t want to believe that, because if varying degrees of blackness become normalized, then that means society has to rethink how they treat black people. In other words, if you allow black people to be as complicated and multidimensional as white people, then it’s hard to view them as the Other with all the messy pejorative, stereotypical, and shallow ideas that have been assigned to that Otherness.

In other words, if you allow black people to be as complicated and multidimensional as white people, then it’s hard to view them as the Other with all the messy pejorative, stereotypical, and shallow ideas that have been assigned to that Otherness.

Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.

Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it.

When the Comrades classified my conduct and my smile as intellectual (another notorious pejorative of the times), I actually came to believe them because I couldn´t imagine (I wasn´t bold enough to imagine it) that anyone else might be wrong, that the Revolution itself, the spirit of the times, might be wrong and I, an individual, might be right. I began to keep tabs on my smiles, and soon I felt a tiny crack opening up between the person I had been and the person I should be (according to the spirit of the times) and tried to be.

Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the values of altruism and equality - even, notoriously (and as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are is worst enemies in practice. So Nietzsche's critique is that a culture in the grips of MPS [Morality in the Pejorative Sense], even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue what would be most conductive to their creativity and value what is irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it.

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart . . . should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.

It is little wonder then that the term "religious" is often a pejorative one indicating an escapist, self-righteous, other-worldly or perhaps superstitious stance toward life. Nor should this come as any surprise, in light of all we have been saying of the pervasiveness of the false self. Since religion deals with the ultimate realities of life, it is understandable that religion would draw out the ultimate in the false self's basic disorientation and blindness. The false self can have but false gods, all of which in the end turn out to be but reflections of the false self as it worships itself and sets itself up as the reason for its own existence.

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it—illness, syndrome, condition—can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness. Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible aspects of a condition. The problem is to change how we assess the value of individuals and of lives, to reach for a more ecumenical take on healthy. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ―All I know is what I have words for.‖ The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

Tag, you know ‘half-and-half’ is a pejorative use of an ableist term,” Jett chastises. “Both the minotaur contingent and the centaur contingent find it highly offensive –

He had been, and in some respects always would be, a defender of established order. Imperialism would never be a pejorative for [Churchill],” Manchester observed.

Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination. As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear, The oddest device can't be usual. And that is where The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee Between the blinding rain that interviews. You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed How it was a rhyme for "brick" or "redder." The next chapter told all about a brook. You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out "Aladdin." I thought about the Arab boy in his cave But the thoughts came faster than advice. If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space The print could rhyme with "fallen star.

The term cult is not itself pejorative but simply descriptive,” the American psychologist Margaret Thaler Singer, who spent her career studying cults, has written. “A cultic relationship is one in which a person intentionally induces others to become totally or nearly totally dependent on him or her for almost all major life decisions, and inculcates in these followers a belief that he or she had some special talent, gift, or knowledge.

Because fulfillment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counseled, ‘in a small fireproof room’ — advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, ‘hidden in forests like shy deer.’ Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.

We can’t just go around resurrecting people, Johannes. It’s against nature.’ ‘Says the vampire. Truly, Horst, nature lets all sorts of awful things through on the nod. What I propose doesn’t constitute awful in the pejorative sense to my mind.’ ‘What gives us the right…?’ ‘I’m a necromancer. I claim the right.

The mariachis grinned and the leader apologized: “We thought you were only a norteamericano.” I winced at this pejorative term but said nothing, because I knew that proud Mexicans liked to remind visitors from the north, “Everyone on this continent is an americano, you’re a norteamericano. Don’t rob us of our name by stealing it for yourselves.

The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an honorable duty.

Republicrat” is a portmanteau word comprised of the names of the two main political parties in the United States: the Republicans and the Democrats. The term is used pejoratively by those on both the right and left who allege that the policies of these ‘two’ parties are, in practice, indistinguishable, and so form essentially one party with two names.

The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.

Turpis autem fuga mortis omni est morte pejor.

Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase “mainstream media,” or “lame stream media,” as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative. But what is mainstream media? It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It’s the news the majority of Americans consume. The brand of conservatism that has emerged from those early beginnings at Human Events requires the absence of professional standards. The entire purpose of this ever-increasing brand of conservative journalism—and it does great violence to the profession to call most of it by that term—is to confirm not just your opinion but also your feelings.

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime (Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress) While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal, more private. Indeed, it was often published for only a limited circle of readers. This was true of Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen, and even more so for the Metaphysical poets, whose works were published mostly after their deaths. John Donne and George Herbert are the most significant of these poets. The term 'Metaphysical' was used to describe their work by the eighteenth-century critic, Samuel Johnson. He intended the adjective to be pejorative. He attacked the poets' lack of feeling, their learning, and the surprising range of images and comparisons they used. Donne and Herbert were certainly very innovative poets, but the term 'Metaphysical' is only a label, which is now used to describe the modern impact of their writing. After three centuries of neglect and disdain, the Metaphysical poets have come to be very highly regarded and have been influential in recent British poetry and criticism. They used contemporary scientific discoveries and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith, and eternity, colloquial speech-based rhythms, and innovative verse forms, to examine the relationship between the individual, his God, and the universe. Their 'conceits', metaphors and images, paradoxes and intellectual complexity make the poems a constant challenge to the reader.

... the very appearance of the word ‘‘oriental’’ as a serious geographic or cultural term triggers alarm bells for any American academic. The late Edward Said’s Orientalism argued that the word ‘‘oriental’’ is a fundamentally pejorative term for certain parts of the non-Western world, not only indicating that they are inferior but also justifying Western colonization or domination of them.

In some instances, the process of pejoration rebrands a feminine word as an insult not for women but for men. Take the words buddy and sissy: Today, we might use sissy to describe a weak or overly effeminate man, while buddy is a synonym for a close pal. We don’t think of these words as being related, but in the beginning, buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister.

nor did it go unnoticed by the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them—some of them, anyway—where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows,

Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann’s pejorative sense—half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of “opinions,” gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.

Some individuals came right out and accused me of being a Neo-Orientalist (in a pejorative Edward Said sense of the term). So of course eventually I bristled at the questions themselves. They seemed to stem from an obsessive political correctness that wished to brand every Western photographer working in Asia as a neo-colonialist, an ethnographer, or a culprit secretly advancing a hegemonic agenda. The idea that people of one culture cannot create valid art in another I found ludicrous and restrictive to say the least.

Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the values of altruism and equality - even, notoriously (and as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are its worst enemies in practice. So Nietzsche's critique is that a culture in the grips of MPS [Morality in the Pejorative Sense], even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue what would be most conductive to their creativity and value what is irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it.

Some people are happy to give feminists credit for things they fear—like abortion rights, contraception for teenagers, or gay liberation—but less willing to acknowledge that feminist activism brought about things they support, like better treatment for breast cancer or the opportunity for young girls to play soccer as well as lead cheers. As Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon observe, "Although the word 'feminist' has become a pejorative term for to some American women, most women (and most men as well) support a feminist program: equal education, equal pay, child care, freedom from harassment and violence," and so on.

I have tried to avoid using the word “pagan” throughout, except when conveying the thoughts or deeds of a Christian protagonist. It was a pejorative and insulting word and was not one that any non-Christian at the time would have willingly used of themselves. It was also a Christian innovation: before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; and words appeared to demarcate these divisions. One of the most common was “pagan.” Initially this word had been used to refer to a civilian rather than a soldier.

To us, the argument for material well-being might seem uncontroversial. But in the eighteenth century, material prosperity was frequently condemned as "luxury" by religious and civic moralists. It was not a morally neutral word but a pejorative one, connoting not comfort but excess, the possession of nonnecessities. The notion of luxury was intricately connected with the existence of a recognized social hierarchy: what was necessary for those of high status was regarded as excessive for those of low status. Luxury meant the enjoyment of material goods not appropriate to one's station in life. Critics of luxury saw it as confounding social ranks. P. 40

That word, which has an almost entirely pejorative meaning today as a hopelessly superficial dabbler, is derived from the Italian dilettare, which means “to delight.” As the art historian Bruce Redford notes, “dilettante”—one who exhibits delight—entered English with the formation of the Society of Dilettanti, an eighteenth-century group of Englishmen who had returned from the grand tour brimming with enthusiasm for Continental art and culture. As the process of acquiring knowledge gradually became more specialized, Redford notes, the meaning of the word shifted. By the time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in the early 1870s, the word had become an insult.

Men have established the patterns of language and of meaning in which acceptance of the present state of affairs is known as “realistic” and efforts to create a more feminist or woman-defined world are pejoratively called “utopian.” Thus, women who emphasize the necessity of vision are vulnerable to charges of distracting other women’s attention away from the real problems of women’s oppression and to accusations of romantic simplification or sentimentalizing. Anyone who proposes to speak about vision, especially that of seeing beyond the ordinary faculty of sight, is temporarily daunted by the “vision,” or should I say the “specter,” of being labeled “soft-brained.

Reagan Democrats increasingly extended their antipathy from nonwhites to government as a whole. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics. These sentiments have important implications for Democrats, as virtually all progressive symbols and themes have been redefined in racial and pejorative terms.”57 This last insight, that for Democratic defectors “virtually all progressive symbols and themes have been redefined in racial and pejorative terms,” goes to the root of how dog whistle racism wrecks the middle class. Progressive politics in general—not liberal politics only as applied to nonwhites—was

When I say we, I'm referring to society: copywriters, companies, and overall general opinion; I am in no way taking personal responsibility. We/they market to women like they are giant toddlers. This endless, pejorative, female-targeted infantilization of the English language when it's directed toward women: "Mama Bear needs her beauty rest!" "Rockstar gal gets her glam on!" "Work it, she-entrepreneur!" "Be a diva-licious ass-kicker in stilettos! The biggest, badass, boss-babe in herstory! The fiercest, she-matologist working in the blood lab!" This pervasive rhetoric is basically watered down, digestible empowerment designed to get a woman's money. It's the advertising equivalent of a "Live Laugh Love" sign.

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.” For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel—for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its “two-timers.” Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division—a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.

Ḥayā’, in Arabic, conveys the meaning of “shame,” though the root word of ḥayā’ is closely associated with “life” and “living.” The Prophet stated, “Every religion has a quality that is characteristic of that religion, and the characteristic of my religion is ḥayā’,” an internal sense of shame that includes bashfulness and modesty. As children, many of us had someone say to us at times, “Shame on you!” Unfortunately, shame has now come to be viewed as a negative word, as if it were a pejorative. Parents are now often advised to never cause a child to feel shame. The current wisdom largely suggests that adults should always make the child feel good, regardless of his or her behavior. However, doing so eventually disables naturally occurring deterrents to misbehavior.

DFW:  Isn’t verbosity, the term itself, pejorative? Is this not a loaded question? Verbose is not neutral.   BAG:   Why is it bad to have extra words in a sentence?   DFW:  Doesn’t extra, itself, imply . . . It’s very . . . I don’t think verbosity, in terms of using a lot of words, is always a bad thing artistically. In the kind of writing that we’re talking about, there are probably two big dangers. One is that it makes the reader work harder, and that’s never good. The other is that if the reader becomes conscious that she’s having to work harder because you’re being verbose, now she’s apt not only to dislike the piece of writing; she’s apt to draw certain conclusions about you as a person that are unfavorable. So you run the risk of losing kind of both your logical appeal and your ethical appeal.

The authors analyzed 695 news items. The content of 47.9% (n = 333) of the articles was not strictly related to mental illness, but rather clinical or psychiatric terms were used metaphorically, and frequently in a pejorative sense. The remaining 52.1% (n = 362) consisted of news items related specifically to mental illness. Of these, news items linking mental illness to danger were the most common (178 texts, 49.2%), specifically those associating mental illness with violent crime (130 texts, 35.9%) or a danger to others (126 texts, 34.8%). The results confirm the hypothesis that the press treats mental illness in a manner that encourages stigmatization. The authors appeal to the press's responsibility to society and advocate an active role in reducing the stigma towards mental illness. Reinforcing Stigmatization: Coverage of Mental Illness in Spanish Newspapers. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives. Volume 19, Issue 11, 2014

In my writing and lectures, I try to refer to, for example, lepers, schizophrenics, or epileptics instead as, “people with” leprosy, schizophrenia, or epilepsy. It is a reminder both that there are actual humans involved in these maladies and that such people are not merely their disease. I’m dropping that convention in this section, reflecting the nature of this historical event—for the promulgators of this savagery, their actions did not concern “people with leprosy.” They concerned “the lepers.

In April 2004, Google had one of its countless minicrises, over an anti-Semitic website called Jew Watch. When someone typed “Jew” into Google’s search box, the first result was often a link to that hate site. Critics urged Google to exclude it in its search results. Brin publicly grappled with the dilemma. His view on what Google should do—maintain the sanctity of search—was rational, but a tremor in his voice betrayed how much he was troubled that his search engine was sending people to a cesspool of bigotry. “My reaction was to be really upset about it,” he admitted at the time. “It was certainly not something I want to see.” Then he launched into an analysis of why Google’s algorithms yielded that result, mainly because the signals triggered by the keyword “Jew” reflected the frequent use of that abbreviation as a pejorative. The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. “I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,” he said. “It’s a bad technology practice.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Beyond those somewhat anchored fantasy settings are the wild-eyed and the wahoo worlds. This is by no means pejorative, as these include some of my personal favorites, but it is meant to show that there are high-concept, love-’em-or-hate-’em sorts of settings. Call them worlds of pure chaos, places where anything goes and where the usual rules do not apply. They are not meant to be realistic, and indeed that is their appeal. They are settings unmoored from reality and operating by rules of your design—but these settings do have rules. To provide some examples, think of places like China Mieville’s Bas Lag, Pratchett’s Disc World, Frank Baum’s Oz, David “Zeb” Cook’s Dark Sun and Planescape, Keith Baker’s Eberron, Jim Ward’s Gamma World, NCSoft’s Guild Wars, Andrew Leker’s Jorune, Michael Moorcock’s Melnibone, Jeff Grubb’s Spelljammer, and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. These are places where truly Weird Shit happens, with different rules of physics, alien landscapes, magical wastelands, alien gods, mutants, and cosmologies. It’s fun to go out on the edge, and fantasy is always exploring strange places like this. These are the high-wire acts of worldbuilding. They take creative risks, not always successfully, and they endure a higher degree of mockery than the real fantasies or anchored fantasies do because of those creative risks. They also attract a loyal following who love that particular flavor of weird. Just ask any Planescape fan.

Obviously, the leveling process applies to the sexes as well. The Soviet emancipation of the woman parallels the emancipation that in America the feminist idiocy, deriving from 'democracy' all its logical conclusions, had achieved a long time ago in conjunction with the materialistic and practical degradation of man. Through countless and repeated divorces the disintegration of the family in America is characterized by the same pace that we could expect in a society that knows only 'comrades.' The women, having given up their true nature, believe they can elevate themselves by taking on and practicing all kinds of traditionally masculine activities. These women are chaste in their immorality and banal even in their lowest perversions; quite often they find in alcohol the way to rid themselves of the repressed or deviated energies of their nature. Moreover, young women seem to know very little of the polarity and the elemental magnetism of sex as they indulge in a comradely and sportive promiscuity. These phenomena are typically American, even though their contagious diffusion all over the world makes it difficult for people to trace their origin to America. Actually, if there is a difference between this promiscuity and that envisioned by communism, it is resolved in a pejorative sense by a gynaecocratic factor, since every woman and young girl in America and other Anglo-Saxon countries considers it only natural that some kind of pre-eminence and existential respectability be bestowed upon her as if it were her inalienable right.

Although Zolla no longer associated with Julius Evola, he nevertheless arranged for me to meet Italy’s most famous crypto-traditionalist writer who was a very controversial figure because of his espousal of the cause of Mussolini during the Second World War. I had already read some of Evola’s works, many of which are now being translated into English and are attracting some attention in philosophical circles. But based on the image I had of him as an expositor of traditional doctrines including Yoga, I was surprised to see him, now crippled as a result of a bomb explosion in 1945, living in the center of Rome in a large old apartment which was severe and fairly dark and without works of traditional art which I had expected to see around him. He had piercing eyes and gazed directly at me as we spoke about knightly initiation, myths and symbols of ancient Persia, traditional alchemy and Hermeticism and similar subjects. While he extolled the ancient Romans and their virtues, he spoke pejoratively about his contemporary Italians. When I asked him what happened to those Roman virtues, he said they traveled north to Germany and we were left with Italian waiters singing o sole mio! He also seemed to have little knowledge or interest in esoteric Christianity and refuse to acknowledge the presence of a sapiental current in Christianity. It was surprising for me to see an Italian sitting a few minutes from the Vatican, with his immense knowledge of various esoteric philosophies from the Greek to the Indian, being so impervious to the inner realities of the tradition so close to his home.

This should have stopped the schizophrenogenic voodoo right in its tracks. High blood pressure can be lessened with a drug that blocks a receptor for a different type of neurotransmitter, and you conclude that a core problem was too much of that neurotransmitter. But schizophrenic symptoms can be lessened with a drug that blocks dopamine receptors, and you still conclude that the core problem is toxic mothering. Remarkably, that’s what psychiatry’s psychoanalytic ruling class concluded. After fighting the introduction of the medications tooth and nail in America and eventually losing, they came up with an accommodation: neuroleptics weren’t doing anything to the core problems of schizophrenia; they just sedated patients enough so that it is easier to psychodynamically make progress with them about the scars from how they were mothered. The psychoanalytic scumbags even developed a sneering, pejorative term for families (i.e., mothers) of schizophrenic patients who tried to dodge responsibility by believing that it was a brain disease: dissociative-organic types. The influential 1958 book Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study (John Wiley), by the Viennese psychiatrist Frederick Redlich, who chaired Yale’s psychiatry department for seventeen years, and the Yale sociologist August Hollingshead, explained it all. Dissociative-organic types were typically lower-class, less educated people, for whom “It’s a biochemical disorder” was akin to still believing in the evil eye, an easy, erroneous explanation for those not intelligent enough to understand Freud. Schizophrenia was still caused by lousy parenting, and nothing was to change in the mainstream for decades.

Yes, he was still relatively inexperienced, but he did know that long discussions of politically incorrect pejoratives in the middle of a blowjob weren't exactly, well, stimulating.

No sooner would a mushaira start than the audience would clamour for ‘Parwana’ (moth) the pseudonym which he used. (I always referred to him as patanga which is the pejorative for a moth).

To be fair, I hate the N-word and avoid using it because the N-word has always been a pejorative, a word designed to remind black people of their place, a word to reinforce a perception of inferiority. I have no interest in using the word to describe myself or any person of color, under any circumstance. There is no reclamation to be had.

They continued smoking until coffee was brought in. Adams wrote Jefferson that he “alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco.”96 One of the two standing secretaries, reported the American, “appeared in raptures,” over Adams’s behavior until “the superior of them who speaks a few words of French cryed out in extacy, ‘Monsieur votes etes un Turk,’ ” or “Mr., you are a Turk!”97 This was meant as the highest form of praise for the American, but one wonders whether Adams appreciated the attendant irony of what was a common pejorative in early American political rhetoric being turned on its head in his honor. With the serving of tobacco and coffee, products from the New World and the Old, “the necessary civilities” had concluded.98 It was time to negotiate.

Too often, when a defense attorney wins a case on constitutional grounds, it is offhandedly described in the press, and sometimes even by our society in general, as a “loophole.” This is always done so in the pejorative sense, as in, “That scumbag lawyer got his terrible criminal client off on a goddamned loophole. It’s a travesty of justice.” Unfortunately, this statement, this sentiment is completely ass-backward. When a defendant is convicted of a crime in spite of his or her constitutional protections, that is the loophole—that is the true travesty. Otherwise, why have a Constitution? Why don’t we just revert to mob rule, mob lynchings? Why is it so often accepted practice in the minds of some in this country that the police can break the law in their efforts to get the bad guy, as long as they get the bad guy? How silly is that, the police can break the law in order to arrest a person that broke the law? What?

We both are a pejorative—liberals. Spartak, I believe an active and powerful government is the only counterbalance against rapacious business interests, unprincipled individuals and groups often all too willing to deceive, poison, and ruin in the name of their own liberty. Without us, the powerful face no limits, no scrutiny, pay no price and never face justice. My life’s work is to return integrity and influence to the public sphere. I wear barronial scorn with pride.” He shook his head. “Of course most people think I’m a fool.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Washington Speaking to his niece and then Spartak Jones in a restaurant named after author Ayn Rand, San Francisco, in the year 2115 The Chronicles of Spartak—Rising Son, a novel

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was one of the key figures of decadentism. This turn-of-the-century trend was an outgrowth of romanticism and carried certain features to and past their breaking point. However, the word "decadent" can be used in two ways. One the one hand, it is a fairly neutral term referring to a certain postromantic trend in the arts running parallel and partly covering styles ranging from Pre-Raphaelitism to symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, and so on, and including artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Jovis Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé in France, Oscar Wilde and William butler Yeats in Britain, Gerhard Hauptmann and Stefan George in Germany, and D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello in Italy. Sometimes the term has been extended to included even Proust, Mann and James Joyce. On the other hand, the word "decadence" has pejorative connotations. Thus works considered decadent can only too easily be considered to actually promote the excesses they depict in such loving detail. And true enough, at its most excessive , decadentism could lead to indulgence in shameless subjectivity and sensuality, a wallowing in the forbidden and the perverse, morbid interest in sickness and death, a flaunting of moral and social values, fierce antireligiousness and arrogant faith in the rights and possibilities of men supoosedly elect because of racial or cultural superiority and threatened only by undecipherable and pernicious women. In any case, decadence in the arts obviously cannot be separated from its social context: bourgeois society heading toward a crisis at the turn of the century.

Tom Mitchell, a leading symbolist, calls it “the futility of bias-free learning.” In ordinary life, bias is a pejorative word: preconceived notions are bad. But in machine learning, preconceived notions are indispensable; you can’t learn without them. In fact, preconceived notions are also indispensable to human cognition, but they’re hardwired into the brain, and we take them for granted. It’s biases over and beyond those that are questionable.

Having grown rapidly, many PC software companies were stretched to the limit simply building their programs. With customers clamoring for new products, testing inevitably had to take a backseat. In addition, though it was eroding, there remained a pejorative attitude toward testing: “Let the customer test the program.” That saved the builder money and time, but it frustrated buyers, who came to view the first release of a program as a gamble. Microsoft

hackerese pejorative.

I just love bossy women. I could be around them all day. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term at all. It means someone's passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn't mind leading.

Here, people liked to show that they appreciated women, unlike in the street, where a pejorative tsss, tsss hissed whenever some unveiled female crossed a Muslim’s path.

Chamberlain moved again to concession. “Appeasement” was at that time a popular and not a pejorative word.

Pagan comes from the Latin paganus, a peasant or country dweller. Formerly people used the word in reference to a non-Christian. The word then expanded over time to pejoratively mean anyone who was not “of The Book,” namely a person who was not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim. It gained negative connotations over time and came to mean someone who was an uncivilized “idolater.

Some unions do live up to the pejorative labels given to them by corporate media, but most do not. People are flawed, and unions are made up of people, so unions, too, can be flawed.

A heretic who recanted was made to embroider a bundle of sticks (a faggot) to their sleeve in reminder of the fire they had escaped and may yet suffer. The term once used against argumentative women is now used as a pejorative against homosexuals, the other targeted practitioners of non-reproductive sex.

There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle

I have tried to avoid using the word “pagan” throughout, except when conveying the thoughts or deeds of a Christian protagonist. It was a pejorative and insulting word and was not one that any non-Christian at the time would have willingly used of themselves. It was also a Christian innovation: before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries;

Trump did extremely well with voters that some analysts have called ‘white trash’, the pejorative epithet frequently used to describe poor white people throughout history. It was a cry for survival based on the only thing they had a handle on: being white

Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word.

The impatience with injustice that youth often express is sometimes dismissed as lacking theological grounding or gets labeled with pejoratives such as “slactivism,” the sense that the “slacker” generation is angry about these issues but that aside from shooting off their mouths, they are not doing anything about

Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction. —

in the technology industry we would call The Life of Pablo a minimum viable product. That may sound like a pejorative term, but a minimum viable product is actually incredibly important. Only after it gets something out in the market can a business gather customer feedback and use this data to iterate and improve in a continuous deployment cycle. The MVP is a defining principle of cloud software development, and Kanye applied it to his music-writing process.

How many of us would agree with this statement: “ ‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’ ” These are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who, like Trump, identifies as “not racist.” How many of us who despise the Trumps and White supremacists of the world share their self-definition of “not racist”?

Life is so much better when people are great at their work and love it. The idea of climbing a corporate ladder is not inspiring to plenty of people. And yet those on a gradual growth trajectory are often referred to pejoratively as “B-players,” or as having “capped out.” To manage these people well, it’s obviously important to reject these derogatory characterizations. Those who find work they can continue to love for five or ten or thirty years, even if it doesn’t lead to some sort of advancement, are damn lucky. And their teams and their bosses are lucky to have them. Kick-ass bosses never judge people doing great work as having “capped out.” Instead, they treat them with the honor that they are due and retain the individuals who will keep their team stable, cohesive, and productive.

What is the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “anti-racist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of anti racism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not - as Richard Spencer argues - a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it - and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase “mainstream media,” or “lame stream media,” as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative. But what is mainstream media? It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It’s the news the majority of Americans consume.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that the term “microaggression” emerged in popularity during the so-called post-racial era that some people assumed we’d entered with the election of the first Black president. The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term.

How many of us would agree with this statement: “‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word.11 It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’” These are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who, like Trump, identifies as “not racist.

One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it.

If you were to note every manmade item within your field of vision, chances are that nearly every last gadget and trinket was invented by a white man. According to Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, whites have historically dominated the fields of physics, math, chemistry, medicine, biology, and technology. What’s grossly ironic is the specter of people using white computers hooked up to white electricity sent across white power grids to criticize the very white people who made their whining possible. Even worse is the ubiquity of white people pejoratively using the term “white people” as if it somehow doesn’t apply to them. That right there is a collective mental illness for the ages.

One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

In the scientific community, the adjective ‘theological’ is some- times used pejoratively to refer to a vague or ill-formulated belief. I believe this usage to be very far from the truth. It sad- dens me that some of my colleagues remain unaware of the truth-seeking intent and rational scrupulosity that character- ise theological discourse at its best.