When good words turn bad
What do the words politicaster, mongrel, and braggart have in common? They end with a pejorative suffix, a few final letters that change a neutral or positive word into a negative one. Some languages are full of these suffixes. In Ojibwe you can add a pejorative suffix to almost any noun. 鈥淪hoe鈥� (mkizin) can become 鈥渘o good shoe鈥� (mkiznenzhish), indicating strong negative feelings toward the shoe. An Ojibwe-speaker can say 鈥渘o good blueberry,鈥� 鈥渘o good wife,鈥� 鈥渘o good anything.鈥澛� 聽
In English, we have only a few of these suffixes and they are currently not much used, but in the past they gave rise to quite a few interesting terms.
The most thoroughly pejorative of these suffixes is -aster. It expresses incomplete resemblance to something, so it means 鈥渘ot quite a __鈥� or, 鈥渁 petty, bad __.鈥� A politicaster is thus an inadequate or contemptible politician; a medicaster is a quack; a criticaster is a petty or inferior聽 critic. But -aster words have never been particularly common, with the exception of poetaster, an inferior poet.听
The suffix -rel is occasionally diminutive, indicating something young or small. Thus a pickerel is a species of small pike. But in most听-谤别濒 words, the suffix has a derogatory implication. Mongrel is from mung or mang, words for mixtures in the Middle Ages, plus -rel, meaning 鈥渁 mixed breed, a cross.鈥澛�
It can refer to a dog but is generally disparaging when used about anything else 鈥� a mongrel policy, a mongrel wine 鈥� and offensive when used of people. Doggerel is bad writing, or comic verse. Wastrels are spendthrifts.
Similar to听-谤别濒 is听-濒颈苍驳 in that it is sometimes diminutive and sometimes deprecatory. Goslings and听诲耻肠办濒颈苍驳蝉 are baby birds, but a groundling is an uncritical or unrefined person (too poor to pay for a seat in Renaissance theaters) and a changeling is a child exchanged by fairies, or any kind of replacement of inferior value.
In the past 30 years or so, English has been evolving a new example. The pejorative suffix -tard denigrates a person who has a certain quality or believes a thing that the speaker deplores. It derives directly from retard, a word we increasingly condemn as a slur. Glutard, then, is a disparaging term for a person who doesn鈥檛 eat gluten, lactard for someone who can鈥檛 tolerate lactose, and libtard for a liberal.听
One pejorative suffix made recent headlines when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called President Trump a 鈥�dotard,鈥� sending many Americans to their dictionaries. Though it looks like another -tard word, it actually comes from a distantly related suffix, -ard, which also gave us sluggard, 诲谤耻苍办补谤诲,听 and听濒补驳驳补谤诲.听
The insult did nothing to prevent the Trump-Kim summit, but Mr. Kim鈥檚 use of the unusual word will probably guarantee this pejorative suffix a place in history.
