- Emotional strengthening/informational weakening: words take on more emotional (pos or neg) meaning while informational/denotative meaning becomes vague or non-existent
- e.g. lousy, wicked (witch-related → evil → intensifier)
- Social stigmatizing: when emotional strengthening leads to negative emotion, the word may be marginalized, affecting the social aspects of its meaning, making it taboo
- Semantic degeneration/pejoration: a neutral word becomes a slur over time
- e.g. wretch = stranger, knave = male child, villain = servant, cretin = human being
- Especially common in terms for women, sexual slurs
- “Whore” comes from the same root as “dear”
- e.g. whore, mistress, hussy = housewife, wench, slut = untidy woman, puta = girl (Span.)
- Gender-neutral → women
- e.g. shrew, hag, harlot, sow, minx, tramp
- Taboo tainting: when neutral words are tainted by association with taboo words (in terms of either pronunciation or meaning)
- Euphemism treadmill: when a euphemism becomes taboo itself (due to “taboo tainting”) and must be replaced by a new euphemism