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| Subject: The alt-right is creating its own dialect. Here’s the dictionary Mon Oct 30, 2017 11:04 pm | |
| Vocabulary pop quiz. Define the following words: “hypergamy,” “femoids,” “meeks.” If you got all of those right, you’re on your way to becoming fluent in alt-right.
No political movement has created an internet dialect with the speed and scale of the alt-right. Comprised of conspiracy theorists, anti-feminists, white nationalists, Donald Trump supporters, and other disgruntled right-wingers, the loosely connected group has organically formed a shared way of talking that allows different factions to identify with one another. This creates a verbal badge of allegiance, and the terms they have coined can be difficult for outsiders to follow.
The alt-right isn’t the first group to create its own online lexicon: The internet has long been a place for linguistic invention. Gaming gave us “woot” and “noob.” We now use “troll” as a verb in regular speech. Some people even pronounce “lol” as if it weren’t an acronym. Many of these terms were first used by small groups of insiders in internet forums before the words broke out and were appropriated by the greater public.
We are seeing the same patterns unfolding on public message boards such as Reddit and 4chan. Before they turn mainstream, words like these turn an online community into a kind of exclusive club. In the case of the alt-right, people who can correctly use a term like “blackpill” belong; those who can’t, don’t.
Beyond creating exclusivity, jargon like this reveals concepts that a group feels are common and important enough to require a go-to word. There is no readily available term in English that means “women are robotic or sub-human”—a belief held by many alt-right “manosphere” members—so they created “femoids,” a disturbingly common term that refers to women as non-human. Likewise, there is no term that derisively refers to people who believe in social justice, hence the demonization of “SJWs,” an acronym for “social-justice warriors.”
In order for terms like these to gain traction, the community must recognize and accept them. Being willing to use this controversial, politicized slang signals to others that you share their same unconventional point of view. The more entrenched and insider-y these words become, the less likely it is that outsiders will engage with (or even understand) the group, leading to an even greater communication divide between the alt-right and left.
Creating a dictionary for the alt-right By dissecting the internet dialect of the alt-right, we can better understand the movement’s political motivations and views of the world. In order to begin to define alt-right-speak, how it spreads, and where it is used, we analyzed billions of Reddit comments to identify the terms that are being used across the alt-right’s online universe.
Instead of having a centralized home, the movement is split between various “subreddits,” which are topic-specific Reddit forums. We looked at six of the most common alt-right subreddits for our study. This sample spans a wide range of the new conservatism, from conspiracy theorists to “men’s rights” advocates and the most fervent red-state voters.
- r/Conspiracy, where conspiracy theories are traded with the utmost seriousness
- r/Incels, or “involuntary celibacy,” where men blame society for their romantic failings
- r/KotakuInAction, home of the somehow-still-active #GamerGate movement, and where video games are discussed
- r/MGTOW, or “Men Going Their Own Way,” where men decry feminism
- r/CringeAnarchy, where users cringe at SJW artifacts around the internet
- r/The_Donald, the biggest alt-right hangout, where serious Donald Trump supporters lurk
For each of these subreddits, we identified 50 words that were new and particularly distinctive to these communities. To determine the brightest of these rising stars, we searched the most recent two months of Reddit comments for the number of times a word appears in an alt-right-associated subreddit and compared it with average on the platform as a whole.
Our analysis reveals that many of these newly created terms cut across subreddits and other alt-right homes, revealing a perspective shared among different factions of the alt-right. It shows that people who read r/Incels are also reading r/The_Donald, and that there is overlap between subscribers to r/Conspiracy and r/KotakuInAction. It shows that the loosely organized groups that make up this movement—the shitposters, the anti-globalists, the misogynists, and many, many others—occupy the same slice of the internet.
For example, the emasculating term “cuck” is possibly the most prominent pan-alt-right coinage, appearing in the top-50 most distinctive words list for five of the six subreddits we looked at. “SJW” is next, appearing in that list for four of the six studied subreddits. Other overlaps include “chad” (r/Incels, r/MGTOW), “kek” (r/KotakuInAction, r/The_Donald), and “pill,” as in “black pill” and “red pill”, (r/Incels, r/MGTOW). This shows that the culture of these communities is not isolated.
To see how this jargon, and the identity around it, form online, we have assembled a preliminary glossary of the newest terms being used in the alt-right lexicon. We have included the etymologies of where and when they first appeared, how their meanings have changed over time, and how they have infiltrated other alt-right communities. The range of things that they describe, and the specificity of their definitions, shows how the alt-right is developing its own unique language.
More: https://qz.com/1092037/the-alt-right-is-creating-its-own-dialect-heres-a-complete-guide/ |
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