In French, they call it l’esprit d’escalier, or “staircase wittiness” – it’s the perfect comeback that you could have used to get the better of the person you’d been arguing with, if only you’d come up with it before you walked out of the room. One way to make sure that you’re never at a loss for words is to increase your vocabulary by daily practice and study. If you think that you’d like to improve your ability to win in a war of words, then one thing you might do is start reading more books that have a lot of witty dialogue in them. By reading the carefully-crafted conversations that authors have worked on, you’ll get ideas about how you might phrase your own statements and retorts. Of course, this will help you in non-confrontational situations as well, and not just those filled with pejorative remarks.

Here’s a quick quiz: What does pejorative mean? One of the ways to learn new vocabulary is to first look at the word in context and see if you can figure out its meaning by how it’s used. In the preceding paragraph, we’ve given an example of how you might find yourself without a retort to answer someone, and referenced how vocabulary will help you in friendly as well as unfriendly conversations. Given that background, what’s your best guess as to the meaning of the word?

The other useful tool for analyzing a new word is etymology, or word roots; by knowing these you’ll be able to identify them in unfamiliar words and get a clue to what they mean. Unfortunately, this may not help you here, because pejorative is not related to any other common English word. However, if you look at the origin of the word, you’ll see it comes from a Latin verb pejorare, meaning “to make worse.” This will help you understand the definition of this adjective, which is “derogatory, belittling, dismissive, contemptuous.” Pejorative is also used as a noun, referring to a word or phrase that expresses such negative meaning.

Example 1: Simon Cowell was both liked and disliked for his unceasing flow of pejorative comments about almost every performance on the talent shows he judged.

Example 2: “Ambulance chaser” is a pejorative sometimes applied to lawyers who make a practice of visiting accident victims in the hospital to try to persuade them to sue someone, hoping to get money for themselves.