ABSTRACT
Men and women are labelled ‘managing directors’ and ‘actresses’ in contexts which make the usage seem natural, and so the labels are unnoticed; young women are referred to as ‘under-age girls’, and we might not see the slur, because ‘under-age’ relates to the legal definition of the age of sexual consent. This chapter describes briefly, the fact that newspapers also give voice to explicit judgements on people, by terms of abuse and—much less prominently—terms of endearment. Such abuse is common in the popular press, consistently focused on certain classes of person, notably soccer hooligans, vandals, blacks, demonstrators, ‘the loony Left’ in politics and local government, male sex offenders, spies, homosexuals, teachers, and foreigners, particularly foreigners coming from countries which are perceived as culturally very alien from Western Europe. On the converse, explicit praise or implicit approval can sometimes be attached to individuals who are felt in some way to express ‘paradigms’ or emulative models.
