pinko
- 1A derogatory term for a socialist, especially one whose views stop short of full communism.
During the campaign, the candidate branded his opponent a pinko who was soft on defense.
Conservative columnists of the era smeared liberal professors as pinkos undermining the country.
Note
A color joke turned insult: pink is a paler red, so a pinko is someone painted as communism diluted. Bryan Foy put the logic bluntly in 1947: "They don't even have to be Communists." It is an informal, hostile American word that keeps company: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) pairs it with redistributionist, and later writers with Commie. The plural is usually pinkos, occasionally pinkoes.
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Origin
Formed from "pink" plus the suffix "-o," as a variation of "red" in the sense of "Communist": pink being a lighter, more diluted shade of red.