Originally posted by drake7
The sound of a word can also effect the way people interpret a word totally separate from onomatopoeia.

I was also talking to Curtis when he used the word "denizen." If you look up the word in the dictionary it is pretty harmless, it simply means inhabitants of an area. Say it aloud to yourself, or even read it in a sentence, and it carries a sinister feel to it.


Drake.
Dictionaries are always a few years behind current usage; those who write them want to make sure that a certain sense of a word isn't transitory. Is the expression "the bomb" still current? As in "he's the bomb?" That's an example of a usage that will probably not last. On the other hand 'cool', and maybe 'funky' are expressions that look like they may remain in the language indefinitely.

"Minion" and "henchmen" are a couple of words like 'denizen', I think -- one thinks of villains having 'henchmen', but the word, according to the dictionary, means 'attendant', which is innocuous enough.

This tendency to 'color' certain words is thousands of years old. The Romans used the word 'sinister' to refer to a left-handed person and 'dexter' to a right-handed person. Since lefties were rare, hence suspicious, each of those words came to have an extra connotation. Nowadays a 'sinister' person is threatening, while a person with 'dexterity' is talented.

Boccaccio