Derogation Puns

Hi everyone,

As you probably know, children are obliged to go to the public school that is attributed to their commune.

My youngest daughter has done most of her primary and all her secondary years in the same school up to now ( 10th grade currently). We are looking to move and found a great house but it is located on the bad side of the street. On one side, it is still our commune ( meaning no school change for my daughter for the critical last 11th year), on the other side of the road, it is another commune ( meaning "losing" daily contacts with her friends, change of school +environnement and doubling the time of commuting).

There is a possibility to ask the commune+school for a derogation based on serious reasons.

My question: Even though it is a serious reason for us, is it sufficently serious for the authorities to grant that derogation based on our situation ? Have you had any experience with that ? We will not, with much regrets, take that house if the derogation is not granted as our daughters' wellbeing is more important. What do you think ? Is it worth trying ? Thanks !

Word meanings often change over time. When the words refer to women, they have a tendency to change for the worse - Muriel Schulz dubbed this 'the semantic derogation of woman' in 1975 [1], explaining that "again and again in the history of the [English] language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or women may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications." Since then, other studies have found additional support for this in languages other than English as well [2], [3].

This blog post by linguist and feminist Debbie Cameron explores this, focusing on the etymology of the word 'mistress', which represents a typical case of the semantic derogation of words referring to women: "where in addition to being downgraded in status, a word referring to women acquires a specifically sexual derogatory meaning".

[1] Schulz, Muriel. "The semantic derogation of women." Language and sex: Difference and dominance 64.75 (1975): 134-147.

[2] Kiełtyka, Robert. "Zoosemic terms denoting FEMALE HUMAN BEINGS: Semantic derogation of women revisited." (2005).

[3] Kim, Minju. "On the semantic derogation of terms for women in Korean, with parallel developments in Chinese and Japanese." Korean Studies (2008): 148-176.