D. Name-calling & Epithets

D.1 Introduction: Presidential nicknames

During his 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaigns, Donald Trump pioneered a unique rhetorical strategy that some argue was a key political tactic and reason for his successes. Watch this video to find out what this strategy was and how he used it to his advantage:

While one conventionally assumes political debates to be the arena of relatively civilized discourse, Donald Trump shocked his opponents by using high-school-like pejoratives or derogatory nicknames for his opponents. Ranging from “low-energy Jebb” and “Crooked Hillary” to “Sleepy Joe”, Trump went on a verbal insult rampage through his presidency that polarized the American public. While some started to believe in his characterization of his opponents and grew closer to him for what they believed was honest and authentic talk, others started to feel more and more distant from him because they believed that he was besmirching the dignity of the office he held. To his supporters these words seemed harmless or only slightly pejorative, while to others they showed the aggressive power of name-calling. By constant repetition, Trump shaped the public’s perception of many American politicians and may ultimately have also influenced voter behavior.

D.2 Name-calling: The pejorative use of epithets

According to Delwiche (2018), name-calling is a propaganda technique that was identified by the Institute of Propaganda Analysis in 1938. It is powerful because it “links a person, or idea, to a negative symbol. The propagandist who uses this technique hopes that the audience will reject the person or the idea on the basis of the negative symbol, instead of looking at the available evidence.” It is often used in an ad hominem or personal attack, where someone criticizes a quality or association of a person rather than their argument or actions.

Name-calling involves the pejorative use of a linguistic or literary device called an epithet – a term or phrase for someone or something that includes a descriptor and the name of the person or thing. Epithets allow the listener or reader to take a cognitive shortcut and see one descriptor as the primary defining trait of the person or thing. When an epithet is positive about a person, its use can serve to show solidarity or respect, but when it is pejorative its use can result in exclusion and cause the listener or reader to close their mind to other characteristics the person has. Since criticality takes effort, it’s easier for the listener to fixate on that single ‘definitive’ negative trait.

Grammatically speaking, an epithet itself is a noun (e.g. ‘The Bard’) or a noun phrase consisting of a noun preceded by an adjective (e.g. ‘Sleepy Joe’), or a noun followed by a phrase or clause (e.g. ‘He Who Must Not Be Named ’). An epithet is often a proper noun, but may also be a common noun if it doesn’t refer to (a) specific individual(s). When a definite article (i.e., a determiner) like ‘the’ is used (as in ‘The Rock’), it conveys a sense of singularity and implies that everyone should know which one is being referred to (compare ‘sun’ with ‘the sun’). On the other hand, an adjective not preceded by a determiner can sort of bind the adjective to the name (e.g. ‘Big John’ as opposed to ‘the big John, not the little John’). Since proper nouns are capitalized in English, capitalizing the adjective and not using a determiner can serve to make such an epithet seem like a name.

D.3 The origin of epithets: A fitting name

Epithets that use attributive adjectives before the noun, e.g. ‘Happy Jack’, focus our attention on the adjective by leading with it. Since it’s the first thing we hear, the adjective has definitive power. Epithets with predicative adjectives after the noun, e.g. ‘William the Bald’ may be powerful when they use definite articles like ‘the’.

The use of surnames began in China over 3,000 years ago, and in Europe 1,000 years ago. Often surnames were chosen that reflected a person’s geographic origin, occupation, or physical appearance. Before that, it was common practice to specify someone by appearance (e.g. ‘tall Peter’), origin (e.g. ‘John from the mountains’), or by someone’s father’s or husband’s name (e.g. ‘Leif son of Erik’); this is still evident in names like ‘Johnson’, and in the practice of women taking their husband’s family name upon marriage. This patronymic practice has ancient origins; in the Odyssey, Odysseus was often sometimes called just ‘son of Laertes’, while his wife Penelope was often addressed using simply ‘wife of Odysseus’. Feminist scholars would argue that such epithets reflected a patriarchal ideology that anchors an individual’s identity to their fathers and husbands, while mothers and wives never serve as such anchors.

The names of Africans enslaved and brought to the Americas were usually forced to adopt new English, French, or Spanish names, although they sometimes were able to keep a secret name to themselves. Upon emancipation in 1865, some African-Americans did not change their previous owner’s surname while some chose new names reflecting their new status as independent citizens, e.g. Freeman, and some re-named themselves after respected historical figures, e.g. Washington, who was known at the time to have freed his slaves upon his death in 1799. 

D.4 Why do we name call?

Name-calling has its genesis in primordial human social and psychological practices that structure social reality by creating insider and outsider identities. Humans have traditionally structured societies by creating groups – e.g. tribes, religions, or nations – defined by who its members are. Having a shared understanding of who they are not allows a tribe of people to build greater unity, social harmony, and cooperation among its members. Jasinski (2001, p. 202) notes that “in what seems to be an almost inevitable pattern with deep religious roots, individuals craft a sense of group unity or identification by dividing themselves from others. Those ‘others’ are then routinely treated as the enemy.”

Name-calling contributes to negative stereotyping, the human tendency to attribute a single or a few traits to an entire group of people. While based in the natural human predeliction to categorize and identify patterns, stereotyping can be dehumanizing when used to judge or predict behavior, even when positive, because it reduces the complexity of individuals. Name-calling and stereotyping contribute to the construction and maintenance of tribalism, the state of being organized into groups defined by common identities and loyalty to the tribe over others. By using a single definitive term to label outsiders, especially a negative term associated with taboo or undesirable qualities, insiders can quickly dismiss outsiders and the idea that they might have commonalities. In this way, name-calling can nurture intolerance of others.

Groups have names for themselves and names for others. Lee and Lee (1938) note that nearly all people “call themselves by names that mean ‘the people’ or ‘the real people’. All outsiders they call ‘the foreigners’, ‘earth-eaters’, ‘cannibals’, ‘ill-speakers’ or some other term they regard as disreputable” (Lee and Lee, 1938: 27). In US American history, European colonists who first encountered Indigenous peoples of an area often asked them not only what they called themselves, but what they called neighboring peoples, and were sometimes told derogatory epithets which stuck. Many Indigenous US peoples have renamed themselves; for example, the Tohono O’Odham were called Papago for many years, which was a Spanish nickname for ‘bean-eaters’, while Tohono O’Odham means ‘desert people’.

D.5 From Name-calling to scapegoating

Name-calling can lead to scapegoating, which is blaming a person or group that cannot defend itself for a problem they did not actually cause. One of the most infamous examples of this comes from the 1930s and 1940s, where Hitler used this technique to unite Germans and rouse hatred in their hearts against the Jews, scapegoating them for Germany’s defeat in the First World War (1914-1919) as well as the ensuing economic collapse of the 1930s. Kenneth Burke, a famous rhetoric scholar, analyzed the rhetoric in Hitler’s powerful screed Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’) and found that Hitler used epithets to paint the German Aryan race as special angelic children of God, implying the Jews to be the opposite – devils. Hitler then framed his name-calling with claims that “by warding off Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work” (Hitler qtd. in Burke 1973, p.37), calling them “cunning” and full of “Jewish arrogance” (Hitler qtd . in Burke 1973, p.43), and even implying they committed ‘blood libel’, the murder of non-Jewish children for ritual sacrifice, a dangerous myth that survives today.

To compound the scapegoating tactics, Hitler also used metaphor to equate Jews to parasites, writing that “people who can sneak their way, like parasites, into the human body politic and make others work for them under various pretenses can form a State without possessing any definite delimited territory. This is chiefly applicable to that parasitic nation which, particularly at the present time preys upon the honest portion of mankind; I mean the Jews.” (Hitler qtd. in Burker, 1973, p. 127). Thus, first by framing Jews as devils and scapegoating them, Hitler helped to scare and unify the German public against them, and then by equating them with parasites whose lack of a state was due to some inherent evil quality rather than the historical outcome of centuries of discrimination, he ensured support for their elimination from German society. In what is now known as the Holocaust, six million German and European Jews were systematically and intentionally murdered during the course of the Second World War (1939-1945), millions in concentration camps.

Module authors: Jonathon Reinhardt and Anuj Gupta

Last updated: 6 December 2023

This module is part of Critical Language Awareness: Language Power Techniques and English Grammar, an open educational resource offered by the Clarify Initiative, a privately funded project with the goal of raising critical language awareness and media literacy among students of language and throughout society.