Pinko is a pejorative term for a person on the left of the political spectrum. The term has its origins in the notion that pink is a lighter shade of red, a color associated with communism. Thus pink could describe a "lighter form of communism", purportedly promoted by supporters and believers of socialism who were not themselves actual or "card carrying" communists. The term pinko has a pejorative sense, whereas "pink" in this definition can be used in a purely descriptive sense, such as in the term pink tide.
Pinko is a pejorative term for a person on the left of the political spectrum. The term has its origins in the notion that pink is a lighter shade of red, a color associated with communism. Thus pink could describe a "lighter form of communism", purportedly promoted by supporters and believers of socialism who were not themselves actual or "card carrying" communists. The term pinko has a pejorative sense, whereas "pink" in this definition can be used in a purely descriptive sense, such as in the term pink tide.
One of the first recorded uses of pinko was in Time magazine in 1925 as a variant on the noun and adjective pink, which had been used along with parlor pink since the beginning of the 20th century to refer to those of leftish sympathies, usually with an implication of effeteness. In the 1920s, for example, a Wall Street Journal editorial described supporters of the Progressive politician Robert La Follette as "visionaries, ne'er do wells, parlor pinks, reds, hyphenates [Americans with divided allegiance], soft handed agriculturalists and working men who have never seen a shovel."
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).