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Pejoratives are words or grammatical forms which denote a negative affect; that is, they express the contempt or distaste of the speaker. Sometimes a term may begin as a pejorative word and eventually be adopted in a non-pejorative sense. In historical linguistics, this phenomenon is known as melioration, or amelioration, or semantic change (e.g. "punk"). Within some social groups a particular term is still regarded as being a pejorative, whereas the term isn't deemed as such within another social group elsewhere (e.g. "gay"). An example of this is the term "Mormon", which was first used in the 1830s as a pejorative to describe those who followed Joseph Smith and believed in the divine origin of the Book of Mormon. The term was soon adopted by Mormons themselves, however, and has lost its generally pejorative status. In other cases, some social groups have attempted to "reclaim" formerly offensive words applied against them, known as reclaimed words. Ethnic slurs are one kind of category of pejorative.
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