"The online ecosystem of incels, or 'involuntarily celibate' men, is saturated with this sort of clinical jargon; its aggrieved participants insulate, isolate, and identify themselves through in-group codespeak that is meant to baffle and repel outsiders. So how did non-incels ('normies,' as incels would label them) end up adopting and recontextualizing these loaded words?"
"Slang, no matter its origins, has a viral nature. It tends to break containment and mutate. The buzzword 'woke,' as it pertains to our current politics, comes from African American Vernacular English and once referred to an awareness of racial and social injustice—this usage dates to the middle of the 20th century, preceding even the civil rights movement."
"Back in 2014, the eruption of the Gamergate harassment campaign set the stage for a different linguistic realignment. An organized backlash to women working in the video game industry, and eventually any sort of diversity or progressivism within the medium, it exposed a vein of reactionary anger that wo"
Incel terminology, originally developed as in-group codespeak within isolated online communities, has increasingly infiltrated mainstream discourse and media outlets. The suffix 'maxxing' exemplifies this linguistic migration, appearing in mainstream publications like The Cut without explanation. Slang naturally breaks containment and mutates across contexts, as demonstrated by 'woke,' which originated in African American Vernacular English as awareness of social injustice but became a right-wing political pejorative. The 2014 Gamergate campaign marked a significant moment when reactionary online communities began exporting their specialized language and ideological frameworks into broader cultural conversations, establishing patterns of linguistic assimilation that continue today.
Read at WIRED
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]