[CW: distasteful ideologies, misogyny, fat-shaming.]<\/p>\n
It’s a familiar story, one we all know:<\/p>\n
our protagonist, a young white man, can’t find a sexual partner because of feminism, his weak chin, his poor muscle tone…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Oh no, not that story: that’s misognynistic, objectivifying nonsense. But that narrative, regressive as it is, has given us something novel, a new libfix.<\/p>\n
The story begins with two closely-related coinages. The first, according to Wikipedia<\/a>, is the creation of a semi-anonymous Canadian college student who created a blog, “Alana’s Invo to discuss her sexual inactivity. The title: “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”.\u00a0Involuntary celibacy<\/em>, in the community that arose,\u00a0was first shorted to invcel<\/em>, then\u00a0incel.<\/em>\u00a0(The author, as is happened, ultimately realized she was queer and abandoned the community she’d created.)<\/p>\n
In the years since, a community of men\u00a0gathered on Reddit (and specifically the subreddit “r\/incels”), blaming women for their celibacy, and in some cases advocating for sexual violence to recoup their imagined losses. They call themselves\u00a0incel <\/em>(n.).<\/p>\n
Not all the celibate are aggreviedly so; some have chosen their lot voluntarily, and they, in the jargon of the incel community, are termed\u00a0volcel<\/em> (n.). It is not immediately clear that this is a widely-used term of self-identification (though it has its own subreddit, too), and it doesn’t seem to satisfy a lexical need that wasn’t already being served by more-precise, in-community terms like asexual\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0aromantic. <\/em>But,\u00a0it does pair nicely with\u00a0incel<\/em>, and it’s fun to apply this plunky neologism to the private lives of historical asexuals like Virgil, James Buchanan, or H. P. Lovecraft.<\/p>\n
So far, what we’ve seen looks like a standard type of word formation:\u00a0clipping\u00a0<\/a>or (i.e., truncation) of both parts of a compound expression, which are then joined together to form a single word.\u00a0In this case, the first syllable [1] of the both words is perserved. This is not particularly novel: consider\u00a0Amex\u00a0<\/em>(<\u00a0American Express<\/em>) or\u00a0op-ed<\/em> (< opinion editorial<\/em>).<\/p>\n
But as is often the case<\/a>, the clipping in\u00a0incel<\/em> and\u00a0volcel<\/em>\u00a0appears to have spawned a\u00a0libfix, an affix-like formative extracted from the compound.\u00a0Witness the recently coined\u00a0heightcel,<\/em>\u00a0an involuntarily celibate short person, presumably one whose involuntarily celibacy can be attributed to their diminuitive stature. Here,\u00a0-cel\u00a0<\/em>attaches not to a clipping like in-<\/em> or\u00a0vol-<\/em>,\u00a0but to a free stem,\u00a0the noun\u00a0height<\/em>. Libfixation, at least as it should be defined<\/a>, has begun.<\/p>\n
There are many more. (I’m not linking to any “manosphere” sources.) A\u00a0marcel\u00a0<\/em>is an married incel; a\u00a0baldcel<\/em> is a bald(ing) incel; a\u00a0currycel<\/em> is an incel of South Asian descent; a\u00a0ricecel<\/em> is an incel of East- or\u00a0Southeast Asian descent; a\u00a0gingercel<\/em> is a red-headed incel; and so on. There’s (ugh)\u00a0fatcel<\/em>, though there’s debate (in the incel community, at least) whether that’s more\u00a0incel or\u00a0volcel. And there’s even\u00a0ironycel<\/em>, someone (non-celibate, I suppose) who mocks incels.<\/p>\n
Some of these\u00a0-cel<\/em> types foreground features that seem totally\u00a0orthogonal to the sexual marketplace, suggesting some sort of gallows humor for outsiders, and for the mods: are we really to believe that some young man, somewhere, thinks he’d have a shot with Stacy if\u00a0his wrists were just a bit thicker<\/a>? But yet they keep coming.<\/p>\n
[1] In volcel<\/em>, it’s technically the first syllable plus the onset of the following unstressed syllable: [v\u0251l] < [v\u0251.l\u0259n\u02cct\u025b.\u0279i].<\/p>\n
[Some of my prior coverage of libfixation:\u00a0Defining libfixes<\/a> \u2022 Your libfix and blend report for May 2016<\/a> \u2022 Your libfix and blend report for February 2018<\/a>]<\/p>\n
[Thanks to Twitter folks for some minor corrections.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh no, not that story: that’s misognynistic, objectivifying trash. But that narrative, regressive and objectifying as it is, has given us something new and exciting, a new libfix:\u00a0-cel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,26,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-libfixes","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}