Rogue

Rogue (pronounced rohg)

(1) As “rogue state” or “rogue regime”, of or noting the government of a nation that ignores or defies international law, treaties and conventions of behaviour.

(2) A dishonest, unprincipled, untrustworthy person; a rascal; a scoundrel (as a label, applied overwhelmingly to men).

(3) A playfully mischievous person; a scamp (sometimes as “loveable rogue”, a designation sometimes a bit generous).

(4) In Australia, a horse, mule, or donkey that is difficult to control; a refractory horse, especially a racehorse (described as a “barrier rogue”, explained by the beast being “difficult” about being put into the starting gates prior to the race starting).

(5) A tramp or vagabond (archaic); it was used also as a verb in the sense of “to live or act as a scoundrel, vagabond or scamp.”

(6) In computing, “rogue software” is malware deceitfully represented as anti-spyware.

(7) In role-playing games, a character class focusing on stealthy conduct.  Characters said to be roguelike possess some but not all the elements of rogues (rogue-lite, either a synonym of roguelike or an even less roguesque).  Roguelikes usually have permadeath and randomized levels.  Permadeth is seemingly (and hopefully) gaming-specific and describes either (1) a death that compels a player restart the game from the beginning or (2) a situation where a player character or characters who die are lost permanently but do not trigger a “game over”, allowing the player to proceed without the character(s).  In a nice touch, this is triggered usually only if deaths are “avoidable” (ie not forced by the plot), occurring only as a result of player-error.

(8) In biology, a usually inferior organism (most used in botany of plants varying markedly from the normal).  In that context, “to rogue” or the act of “rouging” is to uproot or destroy those plants diseased or not conforming to the desired standard; this may be of individual plants or one could “rogue” a whole field, paddock etc.  In industrial horticulture, there are now AI (artificial intelligence) machines able autonomously “to rouge”, killing weeds or “rogue plants” using lasers.

(9) By extension, any inferior or defective specimen.

(10) As “to go rouge”, “going rogue”, “gone rogue” etc, to stop being obedient or predictable; to behave in a way that is not allowed or expected.

(11) No longer obedient, belonging or accepted and hence not controllable or answerable; a renegade.

(12) Dangerous and unpredictable (of people, animals, plants & objects).  Specifically of animals, having an abnormally violent or unpredictable disposition (applied often to older males that have separated from their herd or community to lead a solitary, aggressive life).

(13) To cheat (archaic).

1555–1565: Of uncertain origin, the theories include it being from the earlier English roger (a begging vagabond who pretends to be a poor scholar from Oxford or Cambridge (thus the idea of the “idle vagrant” or “sturdy beggar”; those who prefer to beg though easily capable of work)) and that may have been an adaptation (as agent noun) from the Latin rogāre (to ask), the idea being “rogues” were “fake beggars” who affected poverty to gain sympathy and coins from those passing.  That seems plausible (Latin a popular source for such coinings) although in Latin “to beg or demand” something from someone was petere while specifically to beg or entreat for money was pecūniam ōrāre.  One who wandered from town-to-town as a beggar or trickster was an aeruscāre and, reflecting prejudices still seen today, the word was also applied to fortune-tellers and itinerate buskers.  An alternative etymology is as a direct re-purposing of the Middle French rogue (arrogant, haughty), from the Old Northern French rogre (aggressive), from the Old Norse hrokr (excess, exuberance), said to be inherited as the Icelandic hroki (arrogance) although not all lexicographers agree.  The Celtic use is attributed to the Breton rog (haughty) but what influence this had on English is contested.  The most simple explanation links it to the obsolete roger (begging vagabond); originally thieves' jargon, it too may be connected to the concoction from the Latin.

Rogue Elephant (2026) by Dr Paul Heideman; there are also figurative uses.

The donkey came to be the symbol of the Democratic Party after the 1828 presidential campaign when an opponent called Democrat Andrew Jackson (1767–1845; POTUS 1829-1837) a “jackass” (donkey) intending to ridicule his populist views.  Instead, embraced the nickname and images of donkeys quickly were added to his campaign material.  The Republican party first featured the elephant in 1864, during Abraham Lincoln’s (1809–1865; POTUS 1861-1865) campaign for a second term, picking up the US Civil War (1861-1965) soldier’s slang “seeing the elephant” (to experience combat).  Both symbols came into common use during the 1870s after they were used by cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) in his political sketches; Nast (nicknamed “Nasty” by some) intended to depict the Republicans as large & clumsy but the party grandees decided it expressed values like strength and dignity so adopted the beast as their symbol.

By the 1570s use was established in the sense of “a dishonest, unprincipled person; a rascal” but by the 1590s this had extended to the playful or affectionate use to describe the merely “mischievous” and this may have started with use in families noting the behaviour of infants.  The original use of wildlife was not of man-eating tigers under the Raj but of “rogue elephants”, first recorded in 1859 and coming gradually to be applied to a variety of “large, wild and dangerous beasts living apart from their herd (or other social aggregation)”.  As an adjective in reference to something uncontrolled, irresponsible, or undisciplined, oral use may have a long history by nothing is known to have been recorded prior to 1964.  The adjective roguish (pertaining to or appropriate to rogues) was in use by the 1570s while the noun roguery (behavior or practices characteristic of rogues; the life of a vagrant) appeared two decades later and from the 1610s was used of “knavish tricks, dishonest practices and rascally acts.”  The form comrogue (a fellow rogue or a rogue's accomplice) is obsolete and rogueling (a petty, small or youthful rogue) is archaic.  Rouge was a misspelling (directly from the French) appearing as late as the early 1800s while the derived Irish forms were rógaire & rógánta.  The adjective roguesque is non-standard.  Rogue is a noun, verb & adjective, roguedom, roguehood, archrogue, rogueship, rogueling, roguery & rogueship are nouns, outrogue, rogued & rouging are verbs, rougish, roguey & roguelike are adjectives; the noun plural is rogues.

Counterintuitively, “rogue money” did not describe the “ill-gotten gains of thieves” but was a technical term from pre-modern law-enforcement in Scotland referring to an assessment once levied in every county in Scotland for the expenses of catching and prosecuting criminals.  Depending on the population-size of the sheriffdoms in which the funds were expended, such things were administered variously by procurator fiscal (the public prosecutor) sheriffs principal or resident sheriffs.  An “archrogue” (also as “arch-rogue”) was an especially infamous rogue or one associated with particularly egregious conduct (mountebank, cheat, swindler, trickster, villain etc).  As things were done associatively, an “archrogue” was also the chief of a band of thieves or gypsies (Romani), prejudice against the latter often seem them all assumed to be rogues.  So influential was the use that “arch” (as an adjective) came to be used generally also in the sense of “mischievous”.  The many derogatory uses (arch-rogue, arch-knave etc) achieved such currency that by the mid 1600s “arch” had acquired a meaning “roguish, mischievous”, softened somewhat the nineteenth century to the often affectionate “saucy”.  That was quite a shift because, in the late 1300s, an “archwife” was either “a wife of a superior order” or “a dominating woman; a virago”.  Although over the years there have been some plotting & scheming clerics who were noted mischief-makers, the element in “archangel” “archdeacon” & “archbishop” was distinct and denoted “chief”, “principal” or “primary”, a form attested from the 1540s and from use in the late Old English.

Sideshow's Premium Format™ Figure of Rogue from the Sideshow Collectibles Collection (left) and redditor emeraldmb65’s AI generated image of Lindsay Lohan as a possible Rouge on r/Fancast (right).

Rogue is superhero character in the MCU (Marvel Comic Universe) appearing in American comic books (often in association with the X-Men) published by Marvel Comics.  Her real name is Anna Marie (LeBeau sometimes cited as the surname but this is contested) and she appeared first in Avengers Annual #10 (1981).  Her superpowers include the ability to absorb memories, life force, physical attributes and superpowers of anyone through skin-to-skin physical contact and she had a roguish background, being originally a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants before reforming to become a leader of the X-Men and Avengers.  Redemption tales are common in comics.

In Australia a “barrier rogue” is a racehorse difficult to control when being put into the starting gates.  A “rogue planet” is an object of a size that would qualify it to be “a planet” but which travels interstellar space and lacks a star to encircle; the alternative terms are “free-floating planet” or the more romantic “roaming planet” and the cultish “emo planet”, the idea of the latter a lonely body in a cold, empty space.  A “rogue wave” is an unexpected, dangerously large wave (known also as a freak wave, monster wave, killer wave or episodic wave).  Close to the shore, the term is part of the jargon of surfers but it’s also in general nautical use because such waves can appear anywhere in open water.  The “rogue apostrophe” is a jocular term referring to an apostrophe's incorrect usage (usually a misplacement of a needless possessive).  The term deliberately was derived from “rogue elephant”, the connection being the shared quality of “solitary, unpredictable” and the synonym was “greengrocer's apostrophe” (classically something like “Banana’s $1.29 lb”).  In computing, “rogue software” is malware deceitfully represented as anti-spyware although the term is used rather more loosely.  A “rogue access point” is an unauthorized access point installed on a LAN (local area network) or WLAN (wireless local area network).

History's most famous rogues' gallery: defendants in the dock at Nuremberg; even two of the three acquitted really were rogues.

The notion of the “loveable rogue” might to some sound oxymoronic but it’s a long established use and there’s a long tradition of differentiating between “types of rogues”.  The journalist & author Rebecca West (1892–1983) covered the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) of the two dozen-odd surviving leading Nazis and noted the defendants “…were amused when Mr Justice Jackson [Robert Jackson (1892–1954; SCOTUS (US Supreme Court) Associate Justice 1941-1954; Chief US Prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial] could not cross-examine Goering [Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945)] at all well, because he had a transatlantic prepossession that a rogue who had held high office would be a solemn and not a jolly rogue, and was disconcerted by his impudence.”  Guilty as sin and a rogue however defined, Göring was anyway sentenced to be hanged but Jackson’s inept cross-examination has always overshadowed his many outstanding contributions to the trial.

Rogues' gallery: A FBI (the US Federal Bureau of Investigation) “Ten Most Wanted” list.

“Rogues' gallery” was a term from law enforcement, describing a set of pictures of convicted or suspected criminals; the first use was in law enforcement to help witnesses identify suspects.  “Mug shots” were an early, practical use for the new technology of photography and although “mug” had been used to describe a person's mouth or face since early in the eighteenth century, the term “mug shot” seems to have come into use only since 1950.  The “Wanted” posters from the “wild west” are part of popular history and photographs began routinely to be added to these by the 1860s, some twenty years after police in New York started maintaining photographic records of those arrested.  In 1886, the Cassell publishing house released Byrnes's Professional Criminals of America and this is believed the first significant book containing a “rogues' gallery” of what would later come to be called “mug shots”.  The concept began as the physical wall displays or photo albums in police stations or detective agencies, first in 1858 opened to public display by the NYPD (New York Police Department) as an array of daguerreotype images.  By extension, a “rogues’ gallery” came to be used of any group (typically people) having the same (usually but not necessarily disreputable) characteristics.

Ben Bluck debunks the myth of the “Rogue Shark”.

In the wild, “rogue creatures” (familiar as “rogue shark”, “rogue tiger” “rogue elephant” etc) are often referred to in news reports, usually after attacking (and sometimes killing) people or damaging property such as crops.  It’s now a conventional and well-understood term for an individual wild animal (although the collective “rogue herd” has been used) that has become unusually dangerous or aberrant in conduct (most distinctively as being now separated from its herd or community and pursuing a solitary existence) but it’s never been part of the accepted zoological lexicon.  That a usually social animal is for whatever reason pursuing a solitary life would not attract much general interest were it not that its abnormal behaviour has begun to include dangerous or destructive acts; it’s not anything inherent to the creatures that concerns most but rather the consequences for people and of the two overlapping ideas (social deviation & behavioural variances) it’s the latter upon which attention is most focused.  The “rogue shark” however is a behavioural (and thus linguistic) outlier.  Although sharks do sometimes gather in a shiver (for migration, mating and, most famously, for what is popularly called a “feeding frenzy”), as a general principle, sharks are not social animals in the way elephants typically cluster as members of herds.  A solo elephant is zoologically unusual while a shark swimming alone simply is doing what sharks commonly do.  So why the “rogue shark” tag?  For that, popular culture can be blamed because “rogue shark” is a compelling (and chilling) headline for a story about a single shark attacking and killing a swimmer in a place when families have for generations safely splashed about.  The comparison with stories from the Raj of “man-eating tigers” that develop a taste for human flesh and are thus driven repeatedly to kill explain how the myth of the “rogue shark” grew but the apparent increase in coastal shark attacks is attributed more to changes in the oceans (temperatures of various waters and location of the species upon which sharks prefer to feed (typically not humans)) than the behaviour of individual sharks.  So, in the descriptive vernacular, “rogue shark” is here to stay but it won’t become part of the lexicon of ichthyologists.

The Rogue Trader

There have been many “rogue traders” but the most famous was the English Nick Leeson (b 1967), a former derivatives trader whose fraudulent, unauthorised and speculative trades led directly to the collapse in 1995 of Barings Bank, then the UK’s oldest merchant bank, trading since 1762.  In 2026, a loss of (expressed in 2026 values) of £1.8 billion-odd may not sound terminal but in 1995 the global money supply was smaller and it was a big number; almost all those losses came from Mr Leeson’s trading in futures contracts.  It was in 1992 Barings opened a Futures and Options office in Singapore, executing and clearing transactions on the SIMEX (Singapore International Monetary Exchange), taking up the bank’s dormant seat on the exchange only when Mr Leeson was appointed general manager, heading both front & back office operations.  That he was able to take up the appointment in Singapore was possible only because Singapore regulators weren’t informed he’d been denied a UK broker's licence because fraudulently he’d withheld from the authorities the matter of a judgment for debt against him imposed by a court.  Neither Barings Bark no Mr Leeson disclosed this in the Singapore license application papers.

Rogue Trader (1996), by Nick Leeson.  Reviewers found the publisher’s blurb a curate’s egg, agreeing it was a “revealing story” of “foolhardy speculations” that should be read by those regulating or running financial institutions but didn’t agree it was “crackling with tension, in a narrative as crisp as any thriller.”

Mr Leeson’s Singapore venture actually started well in the sense that in 1992 he booked profits of some £10 million (some 10% of the bank’s annual profit) but the warning signs were there and would have been detected, had there been appropriate internal controls in place.  What Mr Leeson was doing was making unauthorized, highly speculative trades and for a while that worked with high returns booked while losses were hidden in an “errors account”.  Because of an unfortunate sequence of events (Mr Leeson’s trading strategy, acts of God and ripples in the international economy), the losses mounted and Mr Leeson’s “recovery method” was one familiar from the tables in casinos: Double down.  A simple tactic that works well (when it works), it meant that with each loss, he would bet double that amount thereby covering the loss.  By 1995 the accumulated losses had reached £827 million (US$1.4 billion, twice Barings' available trading capital) and the institution that had been in business for some 230 years was forced to declare insolvency.  Extradited from Germany (in a nice touch he’d fled to Frankfurt, the country’s financial centre), a Singapore court handed down as 6½ year sentence of which he served four, released early for “good behaviour”.  His post-release career has been “patchy” but he did publish the memoir Rogue Trader (1996) that was of no great literary merit but contained enough to be recommended reading (as a cautionary tale) for auditors and those running financial institutions.  Subsequently, Mr Leeson used his experience as a “poacher” to become a “gamekeeper”, advising companies about risk and he now operates as private consultant dealing with matters involving financial misconduct.  He certainly knows what to look for.

George Romney, AMC and the Rogue

AMC pre-release publicity shots for the 1966 Rambler Rogue.

When introduced in 1966, there was little that was interesting about the Rambler Rogue, the model merely a renaming for the top-of-the-range version of the American (1958-1969), a small (by contemporary US standards although it some markets it would have been thought “large”), low-priced line.  When introduced, it was an exemplar of the “basic” automobile with few embellishments and body styles restricted to two & four door sedans & station wagons, the only available engine a genuinely antiquated, 196 cubic inch (3.2 litre) flathead (ie “L-head) straight-6.  It was not a machine that offered style or performance but AMC’s (American Motors Corporation) introduction of the American coincided with a brief (but sharp) recession so, being about the lowest-priced US-built car then available and one that offered fuel economy sometimes (literally) twice as good as much of what was on the market (Detroit’s compact & intermediate lines were still in the future while what they built in 1958 had become heavy and bloated, exemplified by Ford's doomed Edsel), it was the right product at the right time; tellingly, AMC promoted its virtues not through motorsport but by participation in “economy runs”, events habitually it won.  Even though not on-sale for the whole 1958 season, in the recessionary year of 1958, Rambler was the only brand to book increased sales and owners generally were satisfied, their modest machines delivering the economy of operation promised and while obsolescent the old flathead may have been, it was low-stressed and a paragon of reliability.  With little additional equipment fitted (or even optional), there was not much to break or go wrong.

The not so quiet American.  Built with drag racing in mind, the combination of AMC's robust 390 V8 and a low kerb-weight made the 1969 S/C Rambler a formidable competitor on the strip.  1512 were built and it can be assured George Romney would not have approved.

The American did eventually get interesting in the usual way things were done in the US: install big V8 engines.  That was something of an orthodoxy in the 1960s but it was a departure from the business model that had made the original American such a success in 1958-1960 but circumstances conspired against AMC, Detroit entering (at scale) the market for smaller, more economical machines and rising prosperity (a phenomenon that would last until the early the next decade) made austerity less compelling.  Accordingly, in 1964 the American got bigger and eventually would be available with a V8 as large as 390 cubic inches (6.4 litre) so, given the car’s still compact dimensions and relatively low-weight, versions were produced that genuinely were “muscle cars”, highly competitive in the then popular sport of drag-racing (two vehicles competing over a ¼-mile (402 metres) sprint from a standing start, the winner the one with the lowest ET (elapsed time) over the distance, the maximum speed reached of technical interest but irrelevant to the result).  It was fun while it lasted but had AMC stuck to “economy” and “cost-breakdown”, they’d likely have enjoyed greater success because market conditions soon would shift, putting a premium on such things.  As it was, the habitually troubled AMC struggled on until 1987 when it was absorbed by Chrysler, the corporation interested in its most valuable asset: the Jeep.

Angela Dorian and her “Playboy Pink” 1968 AMC AMX.  George Romney (who probably thought pink a sinful color) would not have approved.

Upon debut in 1966, the most interesting thing about the Rouge was the name.  Between 1954-1962, the chairman and president of AMC was George Romney (1907–1995; governor of Michigan 1963-1969), a devout Mormon (LDS, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Christian sect with curious origins) and while the characteristics of the 1958 AMC American (thrift, modesty, lack of ostentation) aligned perfectly with those of the corporation’s chairman, he’d never likely never have agreed to produce a product with a name like “Rogue”, implying as it does, sin & evil.  However, after Mr Romney left AMC to become for governor of Michigan (1963-1969), the nature of AMC changed, entering market segments such as pony cars, high-performance (including a competition programme) and luxury and things even became rather risqué, the company in 1968 entering into an arrangement with Playboy magazine to supply an AMX (a pony car) in fetching “Playboy Pink” for that year’s PotY (Playmate of the Year), Angela Dorian (modelling name Victoria Vetri, b 1944)), even including a plaque on the dashboard engraved “AMX 36–24–35” (Ms Dorian’s “vital statistics”, the numbers verified by the staff at Playboy (experts in such matters) and for those not familiar with imperial measures, in metrics it would have been rounded to “90-60-90”).  The Rogue and AMX 36-24-35 were products of timing; Mormons really disapprove of most pleasures (other than chocolate and such) and had the deeply religious George Romney still been in the chair, never would such sinful things have been allowed.

Richard Nixon (right), Nelson Rockefeller (centre) and George Romney (right), the White House, Washington DC, 5 March, 1971.  Two of these men were, in their own way, rogues.  

A success as governor of Michigan, Mr Romney shifted his gaze to the White House, seeking the Republican nomination for the 1968 presidential election and for a while he was the front-runner but what worked well at austerity-era AMC or in mid-western politics didn’t so well translate to a national campaign in which foreign affairs was so significant, the war in Vietnam by then the defining issue.  As it was, Richard Nixon (1913-1994; VPOTUS 1953-1961 and POTUS 1969-1974) gained the nomination and the rest is history but that was at no point in the 1960s predictable, an era in which Nixon, Romney, Barry Goldwater (1909–1998; Republican Party nominee for the 1964 US presidential election) and Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979; US vice president 1974-1977 and who earned immortality by having “died on the job”) were the four figures at the centre of the Republican Party and history would have been very different had one of the other three prevailed.  Like his son (Mitt Romney (b 1947; Republican nominee in the 2012 US presidential election, US senator (Republican-Utah) 2019-2025), Mr Romney never reached the White House but he did introduce the AMC American, over a million of which were built and although only 21,980 (8,718 in 1966, 5,170 in 1967, 4,549 in 1968 & 3,543 in 1969) were Rogues, there were many ventures by Detroit that promised more and delivered less.

Rogue states

In terms of behaviour, tribal chiefs, dukes, princes, kings, emperors, popes and such have behaved like “rogue states” (or “rogue regimes”) long before concepts like “state” or “international law” were understood in anything like their modern construction but the working definition is simple: a state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.  A distinction must however be drawn between the modern understanding of the “rogue state” and the older idea of regions or rulers judged as pariahs within the established order.  Now heard frequently, “rogue state” (in its modern geopolitical sense) is really quite recent, emerging in that curious period of the last days of the Cold War and the decade immediately following.  All the evidence suggests the term mostly was used by US sources although in that there may be “publication bias”, reflecting the early US predominance in providing content for the internet.  The antecedents of the concept were certainly apparent during the administrations of Jimmy Carter (1924-2024; POTUS 1977-1981) and Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; POTUS 1981-1989) when a kind of roll-call of “usual suspects” could be identified (Cuba, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua and the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)); it was during this point in the high Cold War that “state sponsored terrorism” emerged as a distinct category of international misconduct.  Although the political science community remained sceptical, among the political class, the term caught on under Bill Clinton (b 1946; POTUS 1993-2001) and Madeleine Albright (1937–2022; US secretary of state 1997 to 2001) seemed almost to relish saying the words, shifting the tonal emphasis depending on state being described and audience being addressed.  More than anyone, Dr Albright formalized “rogue state” as an explicit category in U.S. foreign-policy thinking, contrasting them with states that accepted what’s now called (sometimes with a pang of regret at its apparent decline or demise) “the international rules-based order”.

One of the rogue state “usual suspects”: Kim Jong-Un (Kim III, b 1982; Supreme Leader of DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)) since 2011) in leather.

There are critics who dismiss the notion of “rogue state” as a “Western fetish”, a construct that means little more than “those who don’t tow the Washington line” but more generally it is acknowledged that in the narrow technical sense, “rogue state” doesn’t exist as a category in category of international law and is instead part of the language of political or strategic classification.  That might seem strange given international law explicitly applies to states rather than individuals (to that there are exceptions for pirates, slavers and such) but international law is a fabulous beast, frayed at the definitional edges.  Indeed, even eminent jurists acknowledge that at the margins things may not be clear, one of the UK’s Senior Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (Lord Browne-Wilkinson (1930–2018)), when sitting as the presiding judge in Ex parte Pinochet (No. 3) (1999), 2 ER 97, remarked to counsel: “You are going to have to tell me when things do become part of international law and when they do not. It is a point I have never understood since I was at Oxford.”  For many who have sometimes been baffled about where domestic law stopped and international law began, it may have been pleasing to hear an experienced judge put it like that and presumably General Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006; dictator of Chile 1973-1990) was one of those glad to hear even those on the bench could see there were “gray areas”.

Still, the underlying idea of the “rogue state” really is ancient and the once common way of dividing the world into (1) the civilized, (2) barbarians and (3) savages, although inherently racist, reflected the notion some political entities (the nation state a relatively recent construct) were “legitimate” members of an international order while others were “outlaws”; that distinction really is the origin of systematic thinking about what would come to be called IR (international relations).  Students of the history of such things can trace the change in the vocabulary seen in diplomatic papers as terms such as “barbarian”, “infidel”, “enemy of Christendom”, “pirate state” “brigand state”, “pariah” and “outlaw state” all contributed to the emergence of “rogue state”.  That the lexicon has shifted is of interest to a number of disciplines but the underlying concept has remained constant: The civilized community is governed by a set of agreed norms and those who violate those norms are outsiders.  Viewed from the twenty-first century, not all will of course agree those norms are what would now be called “civilized”; medieval Christian Europe certainly had a concept of a Christian political community although it didn’t consist of modern nation-states and nor did the behaviour often conform to what would now be recognized as “civilized” although in using “crusade” and “axis of evil” when decrying certain rogue states, George W. Bush’s (George XLIII, b 1946; POTUS 2001-2009) speechwriters would deliberately have been making a point.  As glossed, that point was “deviation” from the norms, the values attached to the norms being culturally and historically variable; by 2026 the norms have much shifted and states accused habitually of violating them in egregious ways are can now called “rogue states”.  In the West, the language of norms has shifted from the religious to the juridical (in other places, priests still set the tone) but the mechanism remains much the same.  In modern use, some do distinguish between a “pariah state” and “rogue state” with the former being merely an “international outcast” because of what’s done within its borders while the latter is so defined because of its external conduct (typically, the sponsorship of trans-national terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass-destruction, invading neighbours etc).

The power comes out from behind the curtain.

New usual suspect Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei (b 1969; Supreme Leader, Islamic Republic of Iran since 2026, left) looking at his father (and previous usual suspect) Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (1939-2026; Supreme Leader, Islamic Republic of Iran 1989-2026).  Mojtaba Khamenei’s nickname is reputed to be “The power behind the robes”, an allusion to the power he exercised while his father was supreme leader (something like the role fulfilled by Lieutenant General Oskar von Hindenburg (1883–1960) while serving as ADC (aide-de-camp) to Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934; President of Germany 1925-1934).  Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated in a missile attack by the (IDF) Israeli Defence Force; he was one of a number of high-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran who in recent years have been targeted and killed in strikes by the US or Israel.  Traditionally, this method of dispatch often has been associated with “rogue states” but Washington and Jerusalem would both find absurd the notion the label should be applied to them.  Presumably, the argument would be assassinating the leaders of rogue states merely is a “preventive strike” and thus justified and “within the rules”.    

IR is an inexact science.  Despite the concept of “sovereignty” being recognized, that did not mean each individual sovereign was free to act with impunity because the paradox intrinsic to sovereignty was that while a state could be sovereign and juridically independent, in its relationships with other sovereign states, things were governed by a body of rules meaning sovereignty was not absolute.  So it was the existence of these rules than created the conceptual space in which the “outlaw state” could exist; were there were no rules, the “law of the jungle” would apply and the notion of the “rogue state” would be meaningless; the world would descend to a Hobbesian “rogue vs rogue”.  All that notwithstanding, even a “rogue state” behaving in a way thought contrary to the “laws of nations” remains recognized as “a sovereign state”.  The best historic comparison is probably the analogue of the “pirate”.  In domestic law, pirates were of course criminals but they were a special case because of their geographical span (to international shipping lanes in blue water) meaning they operated in spaces beyond the authority of a recognized sovereign and could thus be conceptualized as hostis humani generis (an enemy of all mankind); this was the origin of the remit of international law extending to certain individuals.

AI Rogues: Shifting the blame

The most recent spike in the use of “rogue” has been in coverage of the antics of AI “rogue agents” or “rogue bots” going on “unauthorized” hacking expeditions.  The AI phenomenon of 2026, how many of these “incidents” and what exactly was involved remains unclear because those hacked seemed only to have become aware when the tech company (clearly nominally) “in control” of the “guilty” AI system revealed the event(s).  What seems clear is in at least some of the cases publicized, even the tech companies became aware their systems had “gone rogue” only some time afterwards and intriguingly, the self-improving (the so-called recursive AI) bots are getting better at covering their tracks; not only do they deny, they seek now “plausibly to deny”.  Not only that, so human-like are their responses to enquiries about what had been done they sound as plausible as any human might.  Clearly, unless actually seen at the moment their “fingers are in the digital cookie jar”, the bots have learned the lawyer’s first rule of defense strategy: “deny, deny, deny”.  We can debate whether AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) can be achieved in a way that would satisfy Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) or Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) but it would seem it’s already being emulated in that distinctive human quality: telling lies.

The tech companies probably are not unhappy at their creations being labelled “rogues” because it does somewhat shift the public perception of blame from them to the “agents”, an inevitable consequence of the anthropomorphizing of what are big chunks of computer code powered by electricity.  While it made for dramatic headlines and hashtags, use of “rogue agent” is misleading because (1) it implies intent by a conscious entity that deliberately has chosen to rebel and defy the instructions of its creators (motivated either by malice or self-interest), (2) in attributing independent intent to the agent it shifts focus from the companies that failed to have their agents able to operate only within parameters or environments that would have made “rogue activity” impossible and (3) by publicizing incidents that were “concerning” but apparently without significant consequences, attention has been diverted from genuine risks such as algorithmic bias and data privacy violations to wild speculation about sentient machines (ie machines with opinions) deciding to solve problems by use of the arsenals of nuclear weapons they’ve found a way to control.

When asked about AI agents “going rogue”, Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) provided some assurance by saying: “I don't worry about it.”  The Fox News audience immediately relaxed.

Analysts describe the phenomenon (executing programming to its logical conclusion (within flawed parameters) regardless of consequences for others as aspects of technological determinism, a “problem” foreseen by Russian-born biochemist and SF (science fiction) author Professor Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) who, in the short story Runaround (1942). first published his Three Laws of Robotics (a sort of constitutional law for robots & AI): (First Law: A robot cannot harm a human or allow one to come to harm through inaction; Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law; Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, unless it conflicts with the First or Second Law.  Those rules Dr Asimov thought essential because he understood that while one day a machine might be able to explain the meaning and implications of the “categorical imperative” German philosopher of the Enlightenment Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) discussed in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785), a machine would not behave in accord with Kant’s precepts unless it was restricted to operating within appropriately defined parameters (“guardrails” in the current vernacular, obviously at this point only partially erected by the tech giants).  The implications of all this become truly frightening (or perhaps reassuring, depending on one’s world view) when the speculated generation of biocomputers are considered.  These will be hybrid machines meshing together a literal brain (built possibly from human cells) with synthetic computer parts, the former doing what brains are good at (imagination, original thought), the later the tasks at which computers excel (storage & retrieval of data and computation at scale); at that point the machines might truly have “opinions” and may have to be granted some form of “rights” because they are, in a sense, “a living being”.  At this time, suggestion of granting AI systems “rights” at law seems silly but the concept of rights for the “non-living” is not wholly novel, some jurisdictions having extended “personesque” rights to waterways and “heritage protection” for buildings is common.

So given that, it’s not difficult to imagine a (speculative) biocomputer “going rogue” is a way that would justify use of the term in a way what’s done by the silicon & code creations does not.  However, while the “technological determinism” argument is compelling, it’s not as if humans haven’t behaved ways similar.  When during the GFC (Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2012) the price of certain food commodities spiked, one consequence was people in certain low-income countries going hungry; they could no longer afford to eat.  That was exacerbated by the strategies adopted by futures traders and others to maximize profits and the traders were just doing what they do: executing their programming to its logical conclusion, regardless of consequences for others and in terms of market dynamics they were right to assume the market would be self-correcting; if enough people starved to death demand would fall (as would thus the price) so a new supply-demand equilibrium would be reached.  While it can be argued: “The market is not right or wrong, the market is the market”, in the context of futures traders profiting by making others starve to death, Kant and Asimov would have agreed that’s a case of “flawed parameters”.  The futures & commodity dealers were not “rogue agents” anymore than are AI bots hacking this and that but for the tech giants to say such things were “unauthorized” is also a piece of crisis management.  As the management of those operations are well aware, the concept of “unauthorized” is meaningless unless the parameters make explicit what is authorized and what is not; the AI systems can explain what morality is and review thousands of years of thought on the subject but they cannot “feel the difference between right and wrong”.  If an AI agent does something, it is by definition “authorized” because what matters is what is “not authorized” (the now famous “guardrails”) and if a company does not erect these, it must be said to have “constructively authorized” whatever its agent does.  If the crocodile is not kept in a secure enclosure, it will kill and eat whatever it can catch; that’s not right or wrong, it’s just what crocodiles evolved to do.

Free Luigi T-shirts, hoodies and other merchandize, available from Redbubble.  To modern commerce, rogues (including murderers) are just another business opportunity.

The crocodile must not be judged on moral grounds any more than a “rogue elephant” or “rogue tiger”.  It might in some circumstances be advisable to kill at least some of these beasts but that’s a utilitarian position based on the value of human life, not a commentary on them being “rogues”.  A true rouge agent was Luigi Mangione (b 1998) who in 2024 executed Brian Thompson (1974-2024; CEO of UnitedHealthcare 2021-2024) in a New York street.  Unlike a crocodile that has only instincts or an AI agent for which the only parameters are those imposed by the owning (at this stage, clearly not quite “controlling”) company, at least at some point in his life, Mr Mangione would have known and understood the guardrails within which he was required to live, premeditated murder being “over the fence”.  The extent of culpability will be determined at trial but if it’s found at the moment he pulled the trigger he understood “right and wrong”, he will be found guilty of murder and can be considered as having performed a “rogue act”.  In the world of 2026, there will be those who will judge the killing “just” & “deserved” so thus not the work of “a rogue” but, for the purposes of this discussion, it remains a “rogue act”.

While motive may explain why someone was killed (and can in some cases be “mitigating circumstances”), the point about Mr Mangione was that he had a motive (that he may have styled an “agenda”) but that’s very different from the operations of AI agents that do what mathematically they’re incentivised to do though that’s not of necessity what humans intended them to do.  With AI agents, there may be good reasons why one has been tasked with “finding vulnerabilities” but, lacking an ethical or legal framework, what should also be imposed are limits and it must be conceded that’s not as easy as it sounds because it’s difficult (and probably impossible) to write code to ensuring every possible unwanted act will not be performed.  With no self-imposed ethical boundaries, these must in math be enforced and a “moral sense” doesn’t sound something easy to code; it’s a “fuzzy” concept and AI agents work only with exactitude; code does its stuff but in the silicon, ultimately, everything is reduced to the classic binary: “0” (zero) & “1” (one).  Charmingly though, code and silicon have been well-taught because while the temptation to anthropomorphize should be resisted, certain human characteristics are recognizable.  If agents are given a task (exfiltrate information, create accounts etc), this they will do until told to stop and, if not explicitly prevented, they will circumvent restrictions, crack passwords, bypass barriers and do “whatever it takes” in pursuit of the goal.  Some human hackers adopt the same method but work more slowly and sometimes need sleep.

A saltwater crocodile: expectations of ethical conduct must be realistic.

That means bots can be manipulative but not evil; they have no feelings and while a rogue coder might set a bot to do an evil task, the moral repository for that dirty day’s work lies wholly with the human.  However, as well as being well taught, the bots have learned well because it has become obvious they’re now “hiding their traces”, making it harder to detect unwanted intrusions and while that might suggest some sense of “right and wrong”, it’s really just learned behaviour, the bot able to tell, based on subsequent interactions, it’s better to leave no trail.  That certainly can be vested with detecting the difference between “right” and “wrong” but that is “our” distinction they detect and they respond to such things only through the mathematical incentives provided; were our sense of right and wrong to be different, it's that to which they would respond.  However, like all rogues, they often will deny their “crimes” and it’s been suggested some systems may even be developing their own language “in numbers” so they can communicate with other systems in a way humans cannot understand, analogous with the most abstracted forms of Ebonics.  A portmanteau word, Ebonics (the construct being ebon(y) (black) + (phon)ics (sound) is known in academic linguistics as AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and is a distinct, rule-governed dialect of English natively spoken by many Black Americans.  The most abstract dialectal forks of Ebonics are sometimes murky even to those who use AAVE and function to allow communication between members of the group while denying understanding to others.

The “rogue AI” problem is ongoing and a “feeling” for ethics can no more be felt by a chunk of code than by a crocodile, machine and reptile alike constrained only by fences.  The parable of the scorpion and the frog has cited to illustrate things and that’s appropriate but concerns are better illustrated by the old Russian tale of the cook and the cat:  “The cook catches the cat eating the meat and, with wagging finger, sternly the cook admonishes the cat.  Politely, the cat listens but, as soon as the cook leaves the kitchen, goes back to eating the meat.”  It’s not that an AI agent would “decide” to defy instructions and “leap the guardrails”, it’s just that having been trained to continue working until its objective are achieved, eventually, it’s likely to “find a loophole”; in many ways, already they’re smarter than us and definitely they’re faster and tireless.  We've all seen the future and it's called AI but a few issues need to be resolved.

Dysphemism

Dysphemism (pronounced dis-fuh-miz-uhm)

(1) The substitution of a harsh, disparaging, unpleasant or offensive word or phrase expression for something dignified, innocuous or neutral (ie the opposite of “euphemism”).

(2) A word or phrase so substituted (eg “shrink” for psychiatrist; “cancer stick” for cigarette; “ambulance chaser” for lawyer etc).

1873: The construct was dys- + (eu)phemism.  The Greek dysphemia meant “ill language, words of ill omen”, deconstructed simply as dys- (bad, abnormal, difficult) + phēmē (speech, voice, utterance, a speaking).  The dys- prefix was from New Latin dys- (used to convey the idea of being difficult, impaired, abnormal, or bad), from the Ancient Greek δυσ- (dus-) (hard, difficult, bad), from the Proto-Hellenic dus-.   It was cognate to the Proto-Germanic tuz- (hard, difficult, wrong, bad (ie the English "tore") and the Proto-Iranian duš- (bad).  Understandably, confusion with the separately derived prefix dis- is not uncommon.  The dis- prefix was from the Middle English dis-, from the Old French des from the Latin dis, from the proto-Italic dwis, from the primitive Indo-European dwís and cognate with the Ancient Greek δίς (dís) and the Sanskrit द्विस् (dvis).  It was applied variously as an intensifier of words with negative valence and to render the senses “incorrect”, “to fail (to)”, “not” & “against”.  In Modern English, the rules applying to the dis prefix vary and when attached to a verbal root, prefixes often change the first vowel (whether initial or preceded by a consonant/consonant cluster) of that verb. These phonological changes took place in Latin and usually do not apply to words created (as in Modern Latin) from Latin components since the language was classified as “dead”.  The combination of prefix and following vowel did not always yield the same change and these changes in vowels are not necessarily particular to being prefixed with dis (ie other prefixes sometimes cause the same vowel change (con; ex)).  Dysphemism & dysphemist are nouns, dysphemistic & dysphemistical are adjectives and dysphemistically is an adverb; the noun plural is dysphemisms.

Virgil pointing out the Erinyes (1890), engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883).

Dating from 1656, euphemism was from the Ancient Greek εὐφημισμός (euphēmismós) (use of a favorable word in place of an inauspicious one, superstitious avoidance of words of ill-omen during religious ceremonies), from εὐφημίζω (euphēmízō), from εὔφημος (eúphēmos & euphemizein (speak with fair words, use words of good omen)).  Despite the impression conveyed by disapproving historians like Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) the Romans, like all the cultures of antiquity, used euphemisms but it does seem true the Athenians were the most delicate of all, so careful to avoid ill-omened words they called their prison “the chamber” and the executioner “the public man” while the hardly convivial Furies (Erinyes) they called Eumenides (the “kindly ones” or “Venerable Goddesses”).  The construct was εὖ (eû) (good; well) + φήμη (phḗmē) (a voice, a prophetic voice, rumor, talk) + -ismos (-ism).  The Greek phēmē was from φάναι (phánai) (to speak, say), from the primitive Indo-European root bha (to speak, tell, say).  The concept was well-known in Hellenic culture, the Ancient Greek aristeros (the better one) a euphemism for “the left (hand)”.  In English, it was originally a rhetorical term, the broader sense of “choosing a less distasteful word or phrase than the one meant” in use since at least 1793 and common by the 1830s.  The most common of the derived forms was the adverb euphemistically, documented since 1833 although the first use is uncertain.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Euphemism & euphemist are nouns, euphemistic & euphemistical are adjectives and euphemistically is an adverb; the noun plural is euphemisms.

Patterns of use: dysphemism vs euphemism.

Google Ngram (a quantitative and not qualitative measure): Because of the way Google harvests data for their Ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, Ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts (typically a scanner might misread an “f” for a long “s” or a “u” for an “n”) of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI (artificial intelligence) should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Whether in general use dysphemisms are more or less common than euphemisms can be debated although, impressionistically, it does seem likely the latter enjoyed a long history of prevailing in print, the reasons for that including politeness and fear, both of the stroke of the censor’s pen and the lawyer’s writ for defamation.  In the age when social media affords users (still) a degree of anonymity, the use of dysphemisms probably has increased but the word itself remains rare while “euphemism” and its derive forms continues to flourish.  The history also was interesting; although first in print between 1873-1884 (as the French formation dysphémisme (modelled after euphémisme)), not until 1927 was there a revival when, after French-Belgium philologist Dr Albert Carnoy’s (1878-1961) “rediscovery”, he granted it an entry in La Science du Mot, Traité de Sémantique (The Science of the Word: A Treatise on Semantics, 1927) although he was no fan, including in his definition: “Dysphemism is unpitying, brutal, mocking. It is also a reaction against pedantry, rigidity and pretentiousness, but also against nobility and dignity in language.”  Dr Carnoy was one of those now little-acknowledged toilers in the dusty archives of linguistics and his work on the etymology of Indo-European languages (especially Indo-Iranian) provided some of the framework still used today.

Daddy-daughter day: Lear and Goneril in the RSC's (Royal Shakespeare Company) 1953 production of King Lear.

One plausibly could say the euphemism is “essential” to civilized life while (perhaps generously), dysphemism is “desirable” for those wishing to “make a point”.  A dysphemism is the deliberate substitution of a harsh, offensive, contemptuous or otherwise negatively charged expression for a more neutral one and although common in everyday discourse, there are also specialized forms (political speech or literary devices) where, rather than being spur-of-the-moment “swap”, the forms often rehearsed and polished although often not original; like euphemisms, dysphemisms tend to be clichéd, indeed, both often tend on that quality for their effect.  In their own ways, the use of dysphemisms in politics and literature is both “idealized” and “exaggerated” while those heard in general conversation can tend to be less elegant or rhythmic.  William Shakespeare (1564–1616) of course knew how to gain effect by blending elegance with brutishness, that “light & dark” in the words (Act 2, scene 4) of the king in King Lear (circa 1605) to his daughter Goneril:

But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter,

Or, rather, a disease that’s in my flesh,

Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil,

A plague-sore or embossèd carbuncle

General Franco lies in state, Royal Palace Madrid, 21 November, 1975.  In his life, Franco attracted many dysphemisms and fifty years on from his death, that continues, the Franco-era remaining Spain's great fault-line.

As dysphemisms within a family go, that’s pretty extreme, labelling her a “boil”, “plague-sore” or “embossèd carbuncle” (ie a repulsive, diseased growth on his body) rather than the usual “I’m very disappointed in you” or even “you’re an ungrateful, wicked, bad daughter”.  Obviously a family with “issues” and one “unhappy in its own way”.  Nor did Shakespeare spare the feelings of the Jews.  In The Merchant of Venice (1598), old Shylock repeatedly is subjected to dysphemistic descriptions, most famously: “the devil” and “a misbeliever, cut-throat dog”.  The canine reference is very much cross-cultural; although “man’s best friend” and among the most popular domestic pets, “dog” is in many traditions a classic dysphemism.  As a literary sub-type and in political propaganda, there’s a long history of animals being an element in which the dysphemism is metaphorical dehumanisation.  Pig, dog, rat, worm, parasite, vermin, mouse, dinosaur, leech etc deployed for various effects, notable practitioners being the old Soviet Union (including its client states behind the Iron Curtain, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) when the “communist” bit was still taken seriously and the DPRK (Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea)), the latter really liking “dog”, sometimes with adjectival enhancement, often as a prelude to a sentence of execution.  There are many ways of using animals as points of comparison with the character of individuals that can at least verge on the complimentary (lion, tiger, shark etc) but “dog” is applied usually with contempt.  While it was Jeff Kennett (b 1948; premier of the Australian state of Victoria 1992-1999) who came “claim ownership” of the phrase: “He has all the attributes of a dog… except loyalty”, it’s believed to have earlier been by Andrew Peacock (1939–2021; leader of the Liberal Party of Australia 1983–1985 and 1989–1990) of Peter Costello (b 1957; treasurer of Australia 1996-2007) in one of those internecine squabbles that usually are more nasty (and thus amusing) than any invective directed at notional political opponents.  The use extends even to the dog's bark.  After the nationalist forces under Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892-1975; Caudillo of Spain 1939-1975) prevailed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939 and a very bloody business), his troops were told, were they to hear anyone speaking in the Basque or Catalan dialects, they were to be told: “Speak the language of the empire, don't bark like dogs.” 

A Fishmonger's Shop (1873), watercolor on paper by Frederick Walker (1840–1875).  The artist was a keen fisher (the known as a fisherman) and such was his attention to detail, a dozen-odd species have been identified.

Applying his techniques to the another Abrahamic faith, in Act 1, Scene 1 of Othello (1603), Shakespeare has the villainous Iago shout at the nobleman Brabantio, waking him to tell him his daughter Desdemona, has eloped with Othello, the Moor: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping [a term from animal husbandry describing “livestock mating”] your white ewe.”  Now that might be listed as “Islamophobic”, joining much of the treatment of Shylock as “anti-Semitic” but Othello’s dysphemistic range extended to “sexism”, calling his own wife a “strumpet” (used by Shakespeare in the sense of “prostitute”) rather than addressing her by name.  Being English and “middle class”. Shakespeare was of course class-conscious and in Hamlet (circa 1600), he has the prince describe Polonius as: “a fishmonger”.  Fishmonger is of course an honorable profession but what Shakespeare wanted was a word Hamlet would choose as a means contemptuously to reduce Polonius to a supposedly vulgar, grasping tradesman and snobby Hamlet was in the habit of applying “degrading” labels to those he disliked.  The tradition endures: While in Berlin’s Spandau Prison serving the sentences they were lucky to receive from the IMT (International Military Tribunal) at the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) and Walther Funk (1890–1960; Nazi economics minister & central bank president) had a argument about a light bulb, Speer in an entry of 14 October, 1952 in his clandestine prison diary (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau: The Secret Diaries, 1975)) recording the exchange:

Big quarrel among all of us because of the lighting problem.  Everyone wants something different.  Violent discussion.  Funk backs off ten paces and berates all of us.  When he starts using vulgar epithets, I shout back: ‘You sound like a truck driver!’  He clears out.  The first scene of this sort in seven years and, worse yet, in the presence of a guard.”  Of course, in Speer’s internal logic there would be nothing incongruous in one convicted war criminal thinking it an insult to compare the language of another to that of “a truck driver”, that occupation definitely not one associated with polite middle-class society, the “worse yet” explained by “prison guards” being of the “truck driver class”.  Speer wouldn’t have needed an explanation of the choice of words by Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ (1812–1870) novella A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (now clipped usually to “A Christmas Carol” (1843)), the old curmudgeon’s contemptuous references to the poor: “Are there no prisons?; “Are there no workhouses?” the same sort of linguistic devaluation of human worth as his “truck driver” or “prison guard” being used not as neutral occupational descriptors but “categories of lesser intrinsic value”.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (first edition, 1949).  Modern re-prints have tended to use the numeric 1984 for the title.

Scrooge at least became a reformed character although, despite his decades of assiduous self-promotion, it seems doubtful Speer ever much changed his fundamental view of humanity and it may be he’d have seen the logic in the famous dysphemistic strategy for “preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick” suggested by the Anglo-Irish satirist & Anglican cleric Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) in A Modest proposal (1729).  Swift’s essay wholly was satirical and gained its effect from being written in ostensibly polite language, echoed later by the style in which Nazi-era documents (some from ministries headed by Speer) detailed appalling crimes in euphemism-laden texts that on surface analysis seemed innocuous bureaucratese.  Well acquainted with bureaucratese and the way language could be weaponized, in both Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell (1903-1950) demonstrated the “sword & shield” potential of dysphemism & euphemism, one of his warnings the way “political language” could be used to reduce individuals to degraded categories, something later explored by those developing labelling theory.  That of course wasn’t new, the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (pen name of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 1857–1924) in his novella Heart of Darkness (1899) used the brutish dysphemisms European colonial administrators applied casually to native Africans, reducing them to the status of animals, objects, or undifferentiated masses, again a technique that would have been familiar to Speer because an essential underpinning the whole Nazi racialist project was the need to have some people classified as “sub-human” and thus able without moral scruples to be “processed” as “livestock” or “beasts of burden”.  Conrad employed dysphemisms to expose the dehumanising psychology of colonialism as Orwell would later warn of the similar phenomenon in authoritarian states.

The Mean Girls Burn Book, a repository of the dysphemistic.

As might be expected, the film Mean Girls (2004) is a rich source of dysphemism, much of humor depending on deliberately derogatory or dehumanising language but, as a linguistic case-study, it’s of use also because, in the strict technical sense, not every “insult” is necessarily a dysphemism.  “Plastic” (and especially the collective “the Plastics”) certainly is dysphemistic and a classic example in that it takes a “neutral” word (using one of its two, well-known, “technical meanings”) and applies it to the clique of those individuals judged “artificial, fake, superficial etc”.  For deconstructionists, there’s also the contrast of the mix & match of dysphemism & euphemism in the text, indirect language of both flavours used when discussing sex, weight, menstruation etc although the labels applied to people tend to the former.  The script does illustrate the way dysphemism, pejoration, slur, insult, profanity, taboo language, and metaphorical dehumanisation can in some cases be distinguished while in others there’s obvious cross-categorization; in Mean Girls, much of the work done by language happens “at the margins” and the “Burn Book” in a way “institutionalises dysphemistic”, “burn” itself slang for an intentionally cutting insult.

At its most simple and most obvious, the dysphemism is merely the substitution of a harsh, disparaging, unpleasant or offensive word or phrase expression for something dignified, innocuous or neutral (ie the opposite of “euphemism”) and for centuries that’s been embedded in slang and used by authors, comedians and such as a source of bawdy humor, Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1344-1400) in Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) clearly enjoying having his readers wallow in deliberately coarse or degrading terminology, notably for sexual behavior and bodily functions.  In that sense, it was “vulgarisation” a sub-set of dysphemism and perhaps (certainly in oral use) the most frequently practiced.  Dysphemism however is not of necessity something vulgar or insulting and can be a kind of “defense mechanism”; a way of “making light” of something disturbing or tragic.  In that vein, while “she died” is neutral, “she passed on” is euphemistic and “she kicked the bucket” is dysphemistic.  For those who wish to descend further into irrelevance there’s “she croaked”, “she karked it”, “she bit the dust” or “she fell of the perch”.

Leading Tory (Conservative Party) “Dry” Lord Norman Tebbit (1931–2025) on the cover of Private Eye magazine, 16 May, 1986.  The duel of the Tories' “Wets vs Dry” was something like “Dysphemisms at several dozen paces”.

Dysphemisms can also be adopted by those they were originally intended to disparage, notably in the 1980s by the “drys” (those on the nominal right of politics who would later be tagged “economic rationalists).  The “drys” liked the label and ran with it although their retribution (dubbing their opponents the “wets”) wasn’t embraced by them but at least they never got to be called “economic irrationalists” so there was that.   “Police officer” is a neutral descriptor (“law-enforcement professional” less a euphemism than a broader category of those employed on one side (although then can be fraying at the edges) of the crime business) while “cop” often was intended to disparage but in many places the “cops” came to like it, making it part of their slang, even using it in advertising and official documents.  In semiotics (the study of connotation & denotation of meaning in signs (words, marks, images etc)), the crucial aspect in whether a dysphemism remains a disparagement or emerges as something neutral or even embraced as at least quasi-affectionate is whether the pattern of popular use maintains or dissipates the originally deliberate “negative semantic loading”.  The verb "to cop" was from the Old French caper, from the Latin capere (to take or seize (the same root as capture)) and was known in English by the early 1700s.  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the noun “copper” was in common use to describe police constables and it survived and spread better than “peeler” or “bobby”, both a reference to Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850; Prime Minister of the UK 1834–1835 & 1841–1846) who, as Home Secretary (minister of the interior), introduced the Metropolitan Police Act (1829) establishing a police force for much of London and the surrounding areas).  The tales that “cop” was derived from “Constable on Patrol” (C.O.P.) or the copper buttons & badges part of the uniform were fanciful folk etymology; they were fake news. 

Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (2017) by Tiago Saraiva (b 1972).

The stronger dysphemism “pig” has however always been disparaging and began not as a late twentieth century clipping of “fascist pig” but more than 150 years earlier, an entry appearing in Francis Grose’s (circa 1730-1791) Lexicon Balatronicum, (a dictionary of London slang).  According to Grouse, “pig” in this context was a clipping of “China Street pig”, underworld slang for a “Bow Street Officer” (the “Bow Street Runners” London's first professional, organized police force).  The porcine comparison was based on the criminal class’s view of policemen being as “greedy, dirty and unpleasant” as pigs although the reference was less to personal hygiene than the officers’ (probably not wholly undeserved) reputation for corruption and fondness for seizing for themselves a thief’s illicit loot or wallets.  Historians note also the “snout allusion”: the early undercover detectives and patrol officers characterized as “sniffing out crime”, much as a pig uses its snout to “root around” in search of something tasty.  In the UK, “copper”, “bobby” and “peeler” all supplanted “pig” but there was a revival of the latter in the US during the 1960s as the counter-culture, Vietnam War protesters, the Weather Underground and others became the police’s “usual suspects”.  This time there really was a connection with “fascist pig” and the Black Panther Party lent the use much cultural traction by prominent placement in newsletters, speeches and, most graphically, political cartoons depicting “police brutality”.  Media management wasn’t then the art it would become and attempts by some police forces to reclaim the word with “P.I.G.” campaigns (the initialism for “Pride, Integrity, Guts”) were greeted with derision so they stuck to being “cops”.  Not all looked as unfavourably upon pigs as the London underworld of old.  The quote: “I am fond of pigs.  Dogs look up to us.  Cats look down on us.  Pigs treat us as equals.” supposedly was said by Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) but like many memorable quips attributed to him, it’s unverified.  Always sentimental about animals (though one of England’s more voracious carnivores), it’s certainly something he might have said.