Junzi originally denoted the son of a ruler and thus a member of the hereditary aristocracy. Confucius's appropriation of it is one of the most successful acts of semantic reform on record: he uses it throughout the Analects to mean a person of cultivated character regardless of birth, contrasted with the xiaoren, the small or petty person. The contrasts are numerous and concrete — the junzi seeks in himself, the small man seeks in others; the junzi understands what is right, the small man what is profitable; the junzi is composed and unhurried, the small man is perpetually anxious; the junzi harmonises without conforming, the small man conforms without harmonising. The move was radical because it detached moral standing from birth and attached it to conduct and learning, and it succeeded so completely that the aristocratic sense is now the antiquarian one. The corresponding term for women, shunü, developed along quite different lines and did not acquire the same open-to-anyone character.