Abstract
The term "desolate" began to appear prominently in Czech media discourse in connection with the anti-government demonstrations. Currently, there is no established, academically guaranteed definition and delimitation of this term, nor is there a consensus on whether it is a slur or not.
The present study maps three streams of contemporary media discourse explicitly thematizing the status of the desolate as a slur. Using Robin Jeshion's semantic approach, it is evaluated which constitutive conditions of the definition of slurs are fulfilled by the term "desolate" from the perspective of the analyzed texts.