Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-g8tfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T06:34:03.579Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Race and the language of incels

Figurative neologisms in an emerging English cryptolect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2022

Ksenija Bogetić Open the ORCID record for Ksenija Bogetić [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is often observed that in modern English no political movement has created an internet jargon with the speed and range of the alt-right. Recently, however, we are seeing a specifically misogynist strand of this jargon shoot up, coming from the growing online anti-feminist network known as the Manosphere, and specifically its popularly best known outpost of ‘incels’. The neologisms being produced by incels have come to form a true cryptolect, developing at a rate that almost escapes linguistic description; at the same time, the elements of this cryptolect are quickly infiltrating broader popular culture and global vernacular contexts, from social media to Urban Dictionary (Ging, Lynn & Rosati, 2020).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 89 - 99
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Baele, S. J., Brace, L. & Coan, T. G. 2021. ‘From “Incel” to “Saint”: Analyzing the violent worldview behind the 2018 Toronto attack.’ Terrorism and Political Violence, 33(8), 1667–1691.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhat, P. & Klein, O. 2020. ‘Covert hate speech: White nationalists and dog whistle communication on twitter.’ In Bouvier, G. & Rosenbaum, J. E. (eds.), Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation. Cham.: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 151–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biernacka, E. 2013. A Discourse Dynamics Investigation of Metonymy in Talk. UK: Open University.Google Scholar
Bogetić, K. 2013. ‘Normal straight gays: Lexical collocations and ideologies of masculinity in personal ads of Serbian gay teenagers.’ Gender and Language, 7(3), 333–367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bogetić, K. 2021. ‘Co-opting the neoliberal manhood ideal: Masculinity, normativity, and recursive normalisation in Serbian gay men's digital dating profiles’. Language in Society, 50(1), 93–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bogetić, K., Heritage, F., Koller, V. & McGlashan, M. 2021. ‘Exploring dehumanizing metaphors in an online community of incels.’ Researching and Applying Metaphor, RAAM 14 Annual Conference, Vilnius University.Google Scholar
Borba, R., Hall, K. & Hiramoto, M. 2020. ‘Feminist refusal meets enmity.’ Gender and Language, 14(1), 1–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brezina, V., Timperley, M. & McEnery, A. 2018. #LancsBox v. 4.x.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M. (1999). ‘You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), 443–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnett, S. 2021. ‘Patterns in the ideolect: The promises and limits of corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the alt-right online.’ International Gender and Language Association Conference, IGALA 2021, Queen Mary University of London.Google Scholar
Cameron, D. 2010. ‘Sex/gender, language and the new biologism.’ Applied Linguistics, 31(2), 173–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charteris–Black, J. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denroche, C. 2018. ‘Text metaphtonymy: The interplay of metonymy and metaphor in discourse.’ Metaphor and the Social World, 8(1), 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ging, D. 2019. ‘Bros v. Hos: Postfeminism, anti-feminism and the toxic turn in digital gender politics.’ In Ging, D. & Siapera, E. (eds.), Gender Hate Online. Cham.: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 45–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ging, D., Lynn, T. & Rosati, P. 2020. ‘Neologising misogyny: Urban Dictionary's folksonomies of sexual abuse.’ New Media & Society, 22(5), 838–856.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goatly, A. 1997. The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gothard, K., Dewhurst, D. R., Minot, J. R., Adams, J. L., Danforth, C. M. & Dodds, P. S. 2021. ‘The incel lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global misogynistic community.’ arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.12006.Google Scholar
Gracia, J. J. E. ‘Race and Ethnicity.’ The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 180–90.Google Scholar
Hall, K., Levon, E. & Milani, T. M. 2019. ‘Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk.’ Language in Society, 48(4), 481–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heritage, F. & Koller, V. 2020. ‘Incels, in-groups, and ideologies: The representation of gendered social actors in a sexuality-based online community.’ Journal of Language and Sexuality, 9(2), 152–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, B., Ware, J. & Shapiro, E. 2020. ‘Assessing the threat of incel violence.’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 43(7), 565–587.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honta, I., Pastushenko, T. & Borysenko, N. 2019. ‘Colour component in the semantics of ethnophobic terms.’ Advanced Education, 6(12), 226–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaki, S., De Smedt, T., Gwóźdź, M., Panchal, R., Rossa, A. & De Pauw, G. 2019. ‘Online hatred of women in the Incels. me forum: Linguistic analysis and automatic detection.’ Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 7(2), 240–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jane, E. A. 2016. Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Kelly, C. R. & Aunspach, C. 2020. ‘Incels, compulsory sexuality, and fascist masculinity.’ Feminist Formations, 32(3), 145–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krendel, A. 2020. ‘The men and women, guys and girls of the “manosphere”: A corpus-assisted discourse approach.’ Discourse & Society, 31(6), 607–630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koller, V., Krendel, A., & McGlashan, M. 2021. ‘The representation of gendered social actors across five manosphere communities on Reddit.’ Corpora, 17(2).Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lilly, M. 2016. ‘The World is Not a Safe Place for Men’: The Representational Politics Of The Manosphere. Doctoral dissertation, Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa.Google Scholar
Marwick, A. E. & Caplan, R. 2018. ‘Drinking male tears: Language, the manosphere, and networked harassment.’ Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 543–559.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGlashan, M. & Krendel, A. 2020. ‘Revisiting key-key-words: proposing a method for identifying unique keywords in a collection of corpora.’ Paper represented at Corpora and Discourse International Conference, 2020, University of Sussex, Sussex, UK.Google Scholar
Musolff, A. 2015. ‘Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media.’ Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 3(1), 41–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, G. 1978. The Pragmatics of Reference. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Papadamou, K., Zannettou, S., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G. & Sirivianos, M. 2021. ‘“How over is it?” Understanding the incel community on YouTube.’ Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pelzer, B., Kaati, L., Cohen, K. & Fernquist, J. 2021. ‘Toxic language in online incel communities.’ SN Social Sciences, 1(8), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, J. & Carter, R. 2004. Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steen, G. 2010. (ed.) A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU (vol. 14.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tranchese, A. & Sugiura, L. 2021. ‘“I don't hate all women, just those stuck-up bitches”: How incels and mainstream pornography speak the same extreme language of misogyny.’ Violence Against Women, 1077801221996453.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Leeuwen, T. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waśniewska, M. 2020. ‘The red pill, unicorns and white knights: Cultural symbolism and conceptual metaphor in the slang of online incel communities.’ In Lewandowska–Tomaszczyk, B. (ed.), Cultural Conceptualizations in Language and Communication. Cham.: Springer, pp. 65–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar