The word revolution has been devalued to mean any trivial change or mere coup

Evidence

Since then, the word revolution, like most other things in our world, in our time, has undergone a process of continuous devaluation, and is nowadays used for all kinds of trivial changes and innovations. In the West, the term revolution is now most commonly used to denote some above-average variation in style of life, production methods, or marketing; elsewhere it serves to designate violent seizures of power of the kind that used to be called coup d’e´tat. All too often, the “revolution” is accomplished by a squadron of tanks, the officers of which seize the office of the president or prime minister, the central telephone exchange, the telegraph office, and one or two other strategic points, and proclaim a new regime administered by a soi-disant revolutionary command council, otherwise described as a military junta. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1463

Categorization

• DEFINE: Historicizes ‘revolution,’ showing concept drift from epochal transform to junk-label — useful against relativizing the Iranian case.
• XREF: connects to: The word revolution originally meant cyclical return, not radical change — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 21; The anti-Morsi coup recycled 2011 revolutionary signifiers — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 341; The English ruling class neutralizes change by declaring it impossible then inevitable — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1959 (+1 more)