Interesting. I met Hoyle once and I can attest that he can be acerbic.
IIRC the term “meritocracy” wasn’t intended to be a positive thing when it was first coined, either. It was originally used to describe a dystopian society where the ruling class got to define what constituted “merit”.
Hoppy says it still is.
There is a British/Canadian version of Yankee Doodle. A couple of versesM
Yankee Doodle wants a state,
Oregon or Texas
Moves some settlers into place
And quietly annexes.
Yankee has some public works
Well may he parade them.
English money paid for all
And Irish labour made them
Sophomore = sophisticated moron?
The modern form probably is by folk etymology derivation from Greek sophos “wise” + mōros “foolish, dull” (see moron)
After a report* that the Kaiser had called the British Expeditionary Force in WWI “a contemptible little army,” the solders took on the nickname “The Old Contemptibles.”
The Pittsburgh Pirates got their nickname because they poached players from other clubs. Their actions had other teams calling them “piratical” and they eventually made it their official nickname.
*There seems to be no evidence the Kaiser ever said that, but the legend was enough.
Not in its origin, AFAICT. “Cop”, from “copper”, seems to have started out as a thieves’ slang term for someone who “cops” you, i.e., takes/grabs/arrests you. (The verb “cop” is probably from archaic words for “take” related to Latin capere and its cognates.)
But there was nothing intrinsically derogatory or insulting about thieves calling a thief-taker a “copper”, any more than it was considered insulting for them to call a man a “cove” or a handkerchief a “wipe”.
New Englanders have an association with the term “Yankee”, though not always a positive one (i.e. the baseball team).
“Shakers” has a similar origin:
Originated as “Shaking Quakers,” in reference to their similarity to Quakers as well as their charismatic worship practices, which involved dancing, shouting, and speaking in tongues. The term was originally derogatory, but very early on was embraced and used by the Shakers themselves.
Lutheran
“Lintheads” were the newcomers who came to town to live in the company-owned mill villages constructed by textile mills. Old-family townies resented this influx of country bumpkins setting up housekeeping near their town, and pretty much across the board looked down on them. Those of us descended from such employees proudly wear that sobriquet.
The first source is currently on archive.org. If you’ve registered there (free), it can be borrowed for a short period. Just click through on the link in the wikipedia reference.
“Imaginary” numbers. René Descartes called them that as an insult, but the term stuck. And even today, plenty of people continue to have a negative perception of them just because of the name.
(ok, not a group or movement, but I’m going by your title alone)
ISTM they could have a couple of integers looking at a square root symbol and exclaiming “Radical!”
That doesn’t quite make sense. Shouldn’t the i be saying something like “be imaginative”? They need an a/b to be saying “be rational”.
The use of the term Scotch in the name was a pejorative meaning “parsimonious” in the 1920s and 1930s. The brand name Scotch came about around 1925 while Richard Drew was testing his first masking tape to determine how much adhesive he needed to add. The bodyshop painter became frustrated with the sample masking tape and exclaimed, “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!”[7][8] The name was soon applied to the entire line of 3M tapes.