Geoff Nunberg was on Think (the flagship program of the Dallas NPR station) promoting his new book The Years of Talking Dangerously, which discusses society's tendency to invent euphemisms for words to which we attach a particular mistrust. He said this that I hadn't thought of:
[The word] capitalist got a bad name in the late 19th and early 20th century, when it evoked all those top-hatted plutocrats and so on. And although capitalism was redeemed, capitalist (the word) wasn't, so you very rarely see Bill Gates referred to as a great capitalist. And Wall Street doesn't sing the virtues of our own American capitalists.
Entrepreneurs is the word that's used. In fact, entrepreneurs is the word that's used now even within corporations; they want their employees to be entrepreneurial, which means that they'd behave as if it were their own business. They have a sense of ownership, another word that's evoked in this context.
So entrepreneurs has been shifted to this other meaning, but in the hope that it will still retain the positive value that it had when it referred to the people that started these great businesses.
The clip starts at the 16:18 mark.
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