melioration

[meel-yuh-rey-shuhn, mee-lee-uh-]

noun

Historical Linguistics. semantic change in a word to a more approved or more respectable meaning. Compare pejoration (def. 2).

amelioration.

Origin:
1620–30; < Late Latin meliōrātiōn- (stem of meliōrātiō), equivalent to meliōrāt(us) (see meliorate) + -iōn- -ion

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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Melioration is always a great word to know.

So is callithumpian. Does it mean:

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

melioration (ˌmiːlɪəˈreɪʃən)

—n
	the act or an instance of improving or the state of being improved

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Matching Quote

"If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent—forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching—in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed—2008, to be exact—than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was."

-Paul Fussell

melioration

mel·io·ra·tion