The paper focuses on one particular and rather extreme branch of men’s rights activism—the online incel community, which has recently made headlines in the mainstream media after the infamous attack of a self proclaimed incel, Alek Minassian, in April 2018. The collective of mostly male individuals identifying as involuntarily celibate who gather on various blogs, subreddits, Facebook groups, and forums in order to discuss their grievances on a large scale has often been described as a hate group, mostly due to the extreme language used in online discussions. The slang used by this relatively unknown group, while undoubtedly controversial, is indeed interesting from a linguistic perspective, as it employs several processes in the process of coinage, resulting in neologisms aimed at delineating the boundaries of in-group identity and making the content of the exchanges unintelligible to outsiders. The paper is an attempt to analyse the jargon of the incel community from a linguistic perspective, investigating the various sources for the coinage of ingroup terminology in the scope of the Discursive Worldview framework proposed by Waldemar Czachur (Explorations 4, pp. 16–32, 2016). In an attempt to uncover the ideology fuelling the discursive worldview shared by the group, the analysis focuses on collective symbols, conceptual metaphors and metonymies, or rather strings of conceptualisations resulting in the emergence of a particular term or expression, as well as the implications for the target stemming from cultural connotations of source domains. Particular attention is given to the various cultural symbols that have been incorporated into incel slang, ranging from well-established Western mythological concepts and symbols of popular culture, to scientific and pseudo-scientific research, including the theory of evolution and evolutionary psychology. The results of the analysis lead to conclusions about the links between mainstream anglocentric cultural concepts and the subculture of fringe groups such as the incel community, as well as the implications of metaphorical transfer for both in-group members and those targeted by them.

In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in internet memes in order to illuminate the lived, felt dimensions of progressive politics at a historical moment when those politics seem especially imperiled. The author argues for an understanding of online engagements with politics as being borne of oscillation as users move between platforms as well as affective states. The goal: to underscore how anger and laughter provide progressives with different opportunities to weather, make fun of, and combat the ascendancy of right-wing populism. Rooted in literature on affect and scholarship on internet memes, especially feminist internet memes, the article examines several different memes that circulated between 2016 and 2020, including #pussygrabsback, #neverthelessshepersisted, Prankster Joe Biden memes, and Creepy Joe Biden memes.

This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into meaningful interpretations, which in turn can be devised and manipulated for the sake of humour. Furthermore, and apart from the typical object of pragmatic research (humorous discourses), the book emphasises the importance of the interfaces’ design and of the qualities of the users engaged in humorous interactions (called contextual constraints), additionally highlighting the parallel significance of the various effects, shaped as feelings and emotions, that stem from humorous communication on the internet. In sum, the book delivers a rich and detailed account of humorous internet discourses through dissecting their affordances as a medium, tracking the users’ intentions, and predicting the audiences’ interpretive strategies, with the goal of helping the reader obtain a better understanding of internet humour and its role in today’s online interactions.