Robert

Yeah, because it sounds so fucking stupid.

Because it sounds so fucking stupid and silly, right?

And the fact that incels have invented all these terms, so many bespoke words, and that they're always making new ones isn't weird.

I want to say that much right up front.

For one thing, subcultures like this are heavy on the cult part.

For sure.

And a major dimension of cult dynamics is creating unique terms and phrases that only mean something to people in the cult.

This is how you separate cultists from the rest of society and also isolate them.

Now, there's not a cult leader in the case of incels, but they do use these terms as a way to determine who's a true cell or not, right?

If you know how to use the lingo right, then maybe you're one of them.

But if you make an obvious mistake in how you're using it, then they can tell you don't belong here.

You're either new or you're an infiltrator.

This is an old thing in online communities.

I can remember similar stuff happening on different boards in Something Awful where it's like if you post there and you don't know the posting style and the in-jokes they use, you'll immediately get found out as someone who doesn't belong, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So this isn't weird that incels do this, but what's confounding and is novel is how successful incel terms and memes have been at spreading in normie culture.

Adam's book, AlgoSpeak, traces how this happened, starting from incel-only spaces like pickup artist hate and expanding out to 4chan's R9K board, as Adam explains in AlgoSpeak.

Let's start where their philosophy began in earnest, 4chan.

Despite the forum's earliest importance, it remained a place where incels mixed with normies.