I was explaining the term "entitlement programs" to an Australian who commented that it was horrible that we would give the programs such a condescending name and I told them that I was pretty sure that it was meant to say that these were things that everyone was genuinely entitled to by nature of being Americans. But I don't know that that is actually true and it got me wondering if conservative backlash to the programs has driven the word's negative definition to become more prominent.
How did the label of Entitlement get affixed to the programs? Did the people who named them that recognize the potential double meant of the word? Has naming the programs as such caused the negative definition of the word to see more usage?
Perhaps someone can discuss the pre-American use of the word but it was already in use at the time that America was founded.
This is a weird question to answer because the term "entitlement" as you're using it here has a very niche legal definition that deals with the separation of legislative and executive powers in the government. And that's probably the best place to start.
The government's power to actually affect a citizen is separated into 3 parts: the legislative power, the executive power, and the judicial power; although only the legislative and executive are relevant here.
The legislative power, put simply, is the power to write laws. But someone with pure legislative power cannot enforce the laws that they write. Conversely, someone with executive power can take action to enforce the law, but they can't write laws and so are limited in their actions to what the person with legislative power has allowed them to do.
But someone with executive power also has an ability that we don't really think of much in the modern world, and that is the ability to ignore a law. And I'm not using this in the sense that an executive can be corrupt. I'm using in the sense that an executive has the option to outright refuse to enforce a law that someone with legislative power decides to pass.
To put this in everyday terms for you, lets say that your state legislature uses its legislative power to outlaw murder. Your state governor can use his executive power to refuse to arrest murderers. And there is nothing that you, as a citizen, can do about that. If someone murders your parents and the governor says "oh well I support murder and won't enforce that law" then that's it, the murderer goes free and you can't petition a court to change that. This is how most laws work, and most laws are not entitlements.
Entitlements are different because entitlements vest a property right in an individual. And once that right has vest, someone with executive power is no longer free to ignore the law. In other words, while you still need an executive to enforce an entitlement, they have no discretion as to whether or not they should do so. And in the US system, the courts will step in and take executive power for themselves to enforce an entitlement if need be.
To give you an idea of how powerful of a legal concept this is - again, the governor of your state is free to walk up to you and tell you that they are letting the person who murdered your family go free and there's nothing you can do about it. They're also free not to tax you, not to require that you have a driver's license, not to spend money that's been allocated to them, or most anything so long as they are not doing it evenly - in other words, its fine so long as the law isn't applied to anyone.
But, again, entitlements are different. So long as you meet the requirements for social security, the President of the United States himself couldn't deny you your social security check. If the President tried to do that, you could go to court and the court would assume the President's executive power to get you paid. Entitlements are written very carefully because of that - Social Security, for example, vests monthly and only begins vesting once you've reached retirement age. If Social Security vested at the time you paid your payroll taxes then even Congress would be unable to change it for people who had already paid into the system.
So going back to the founding of the United States we can look at one of its earliest Supreme Court cases - Marbury vs. Madison which decided in 1803. About 2/3 of the opinion in that case is dedicated to figuring out whether Marbury's judicial commission was an entitlement or not. Its a bad case to read on this subject because ultimately Marbury did have an entitlement but the court chose not to enforce it. But the point stands that an "entitlement" was a very old and well defined legal term even as far back as 1803, and it wasn't chosen because of any connotation that you might be putting on it.
To be frank I'm not even sure the premise of your question is all that good because the connotation of "entitlement program" isn't all that much different than "tax" or "abortion" - depending on who you're talking to. Those words might come to mean certain things to certain people but just because someone is morally opposed to taxes doesn't mean that the word tax has an inherent negative connotation to it.