the hours are breathing faint and low—

New page is up! Michael’s mean.

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I’m currently (re)reading Pride and Prejudice and was struck by how “condescension” is used positively*, while still referring to the same behavior and attitude it does now. At some point between 1812 and 2018 ‘person of high status deigning to speak with those of lesser rank’ ceased to become a good thing; the word stood still while society changed around it.

There is indeed a linguistic term for this - there are three, actually! Some linguists will call it semantic pejoration, degeneration, or deterioration. The positive equivalent is called semantic amelioration or elevation. It’s part of semantic change, and it’s really fascinating.

Discussion of meaning in linguistic semantics involves connotation, like you mention, and denotation, which is closer to the “dictionary definition” of a word or phrase. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, because different fields of linguistics use those terms slightly differently and even within a single field it’s still not possible to declare a firm boundary between the two that will always apply. They’re not two discrete phenomena but more like a spectrum.) There’s a bit of debate over whether these should be considered types of semantic change or effects of semantic change, but they’re definitely recognised as something that occurs. So in your example, there’s been a change in connotation from positive or at least neutral to negative, and it’s a really strong one. To the point where there’s been a change in the denotation as well by this point in time, because it’s gone from just being about someone who is of a higher status to also potentially being about someone who thinks they are of a higher status and is acting like a dick about it, basically. The connotation change is still noticeable on its own, though, because you can still use the word in the exact same literal context and the negative associations are going to be present anyway. I’d be really interested in finding out which change came first, if they didn’t happen at exactly the same time, because either one could have lead to the other.

A lot of examples of pejoration and amelioration are way more transformative than this one. For instance, “knave” used to mean “boy” and then “servant” before it reached its current meaning of a nasty and sometimes deceitful man. And “hussy” used to just mean “housewife”! But it started being used as a general term for women, and then as a negative one, until we get to where we are today. On the other hand, saying someone was “nice” would once have been calling them ignorant and stupid.

As for examples where the change is still mostly in the realm of connotation and the denotation remains very similar, there are a few of those too. If we look at words like “geek” and “nerd" from when they started being used to refer to someone who has niche and specialised interests (rather than the performer variant for “geek” and so on) we see that it still has very much the same denotation, but the connotations have gone from being exclusively negative to potentially neutral or positive as well.

It’s harder to find examples where only the connotation has changed, because if a change in connotation is widespread enough to be recognised as having happened, it’s often going to continue spreading until it’s so well-established that it effectively becomes a new denotation too. Sometimes it even eclipses the old meaning entirely. So words where we’ve only seen a change in connotations so far might well end up changing much further within the next few decades, even!

Amelioration has some things in common with the concept of semantic bleaching.  (That’s a process involved in grammaticalisation in which words cease being used for their original semantic content and become function words, often losing that semantic content altogether.) Or I guess another way of saying it is that semantic bleaching often involves amelioration just by virtue of it removing a negative connotation, even when it doesn’t replace it with any other connotation. That’s how you get intensifiers like “terribly,” “awfully,” “bloody,” and so on.