| HN Mirror

There's some rich irony in trying to deny the existence of pejoration and semantic drift, while claiming your political enemies are out of touch with reality.

Words starting out as factual and neutral, then acquiring a negative connotation, then falling out of use except as insults is literally a tale as old as time.

> The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual' (as opposed to the state), 'a private citizen' (as opposed to someone with a political office), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'personal' (not public, not shared). In Latin, idiota was borrowed in the meaning 'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common',[5] and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'. In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', and added the meaning 'stupid' in the 13th century. In English, it added the meaning 'mentally deficient' in the 14th century.

> The word shit appears to have originally been a euphemism for defecation in Pre-Germanic, as the Proto-Indo-European root *sḱeyd-, from which it was derived, meant 'to cut off'.

> In the 20th century, where the old euphemisms lavatory (a place where one washes) or toilet (a place where one dresses[20]) had grown from widespread usage (e.g., in the United States) to being synonymous with the crude act they sought to deflect, they were sometimes replaced with bathroom (a place where one bathes), washroom (a place where one washes), or restroom (a place where one rests)