Pejoratives (or terms of abuse, derogatory terms), including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social or cultural groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts. Sometimes a term may begin as a pejorative and eventually be adopted in a non-pejorative sense in some or all contexts, e.g., "punk," "Methodist," or "Quaker". In historical linguistics, this phenomenon is known as melioration, or amelioration, or semantic change.