“Stereotype” underwent pejoration, in which a word gradually adopts a negative meaning, Mr. Aleksic said. “When someone generalizes too much about another group of people, that can often be ...
Contrast with pejoration. Example: ‘nice’ was seen as foolish in the 1300s. But in modern society is seen as a positive adjective.[3] Pejoration: The downgrading or depreciation of a word’s meaning, ...
You might also want to look at the history of the term, which has suffered what linguists refer to as “linguistic pejoration.” Robin Lakoff’s The Language War has an excellent chapter on this subject ...