It's the Word of the Day podcast for November 18th.
Today's word is denigrate, spelled D-E-N-I-G-R-A-T-E.
Denigrate is a verb.
To denigrate someone is to criticize them heavily and often unfairly.
Denigrate can also mean to make something seem less important or valuable.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Art of Libremancy,
selling books and reading books in the 21st century by Josh Cook.
As much as I want to have good taste in books,
as much as I want to use that status to sell books that I think make the world a better place,
I need to be cognizant of ways people like me have used good taste as an act of cultural authoritarianism to manipulate culture,
denigrate creations from other identities, and empower themselves at the expense of others.
The word denigrate has been part of English since the 16th century,
and can be traced back to the Latin nigra re, meaning to blacken.
When denigrate was first used, it meant to cast aspersions on someone's character or reputation.
Eventually, it developed a second sense of to make black.
As in, factory smoke denigrated the sky,
representing an interesting case of a literal sense, now rare, following a figurative one.
Nowadays, you're most likely to hear denigrate used as a synonym of the words defame or belittle.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.