denigreur

Updated: July 10, 2025

Again, how well it is to have that spirit of depreciation, that eagerness to find spots and stains in the characters of the noblest and the best, who would otherwise oppress and rebuke us with a goodness and a greatness so immensely superior to our own, met and checked by a word at once so expressive, and so little pleasant to take home to ourselves, as the French 'denigreur, a 'blackener. This also has fallen out of use; which is a pity, seeing that the race which it designates is so far from being extinct.

Richard Chenevix Trench - On the Study of Words