Algospeak: Your language is dangerous and extremist, Adam Aleksic cries

Every couple of years, an online shyster talks one of the Big 5 publishers into printing a book about Internet neologisms and usage. Last year’s was Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic (“also known as @EtymologyNerd” [sic]; New York: Knopf, 2025).

And here’s what he looks like, at his most flattering (in author photo by Alefiyah Gandhi [no relation]):

The sweater knotted at waist is not a good sign. (And, for a style-conscious homosexualist, a tad passé.) But neither is the overall physiognomy.

You thought bioleninism was some kind of crackpot theory

Then you saw Adam Aleksic’s picture.

What odds do you give that a creature with this physiognomy can document right-wing neologisms even-handedly or even with basic factual accuracy? (“Men” who look like this are very big on fact-checking.)

Your physiognomy(‑)check is accurate, as it almost always would be. This guy thinks your neologisms are extremist and dangerous, and, having been laundered through Alfred A. Knopf in an hardcover volume, those sentiments can now be weaponized against you.

Algospeak is the publishing industry’s genteel entrée into a long-dreamt-of ethnic cleansing of the designated enemies of the Democrat Party. As such, Algospeak is pre-genocidal.

Dangerous extremist eugenics

Algospeak is a book that cannot honestly define core neologisms like cringe and blackpill*. Nor can this soi-disant EtymologyNerd attribute them accurately.

In Chapter 6 (excerpt), Aleksic spins a writerly tale of how he and his faghags happened upon coinages like looksmaxxing and initially found them funny. Well, they are.

Soon enough, he and the gals began to concern-troll about the dangerous extremism of these mere words.

1. While most of my Reddit group chat found the incels to be initially entertaining, it soon became pretty clear that their philosophy was actively dangerous.

2. Because of how memes diffuse on the [I]nternet, and because of a narrow boundary between irony and authenticity, a potentially dangerous philosophy was beginning to creep through to the general public – bringing its language along with it.

3. If incel memes are so dangerous, how were they able to spread so easily?

4. Poe’s law: “Any sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views,” and vice versa.

   Poe’s law explains how dangerous ideas spread as memes [and] has created a dangerous game of hopscotch. We’re jumping between irony and reality, but we’re not always sure where those lines are. Interpreting words comedically helps the algorithm spread them as memes and trends, but then interpreting them seriously manifests their negative effects.

5. The [I]nternet, and the engagement optimization algorithms that control it, have fomented stupid misinformation, extremist rhetoric, and dangerous frameworks that push their way into our everyday thoughts and speech.

6. Continuing to get blackpill totally wrong:

   • 4chan... doubled as a gathering place for right-wing extremists, whose ideas began to fuse with those of the incels. This is when the modern blackpill philosophy began in earnest.

   • In the same way, most of the highly specific incel vocabulary was built up by 4chan extremists to match their burgeoning ideology. Words like “mogging,” “cucked,” and “[‑]maxxing” became metalinguistic indicators that the anonymous poster was truly a blackpilled member of the community and not some random outsider.

   • It’s precisely because of [incels’] radicalized and insular echo chamber that they’ve created so much language and have many more avenues to influence the mainstream. It is because of their extreme views that their ideas are so easily spread through memes.

Those aren’t even all the examples in the book. Plus he’s got a whole theme going here about how important it is to know where these coinages came from, as though speakers are expected to have continuous front-of-mind awareness of etymology. Quite the niggardly view of the human linguistic faculty.

In an epic absence of self-awareness or even daily usage of a bathroom mirror, Aleksic is very concerned about eugenics, up to and including the wielding of head calipers (“skull measurement”). Wait till he finds out what a spiteful mutant (he) is.

Aleksic and his polycule manqué make looksmaxxing and Chad seem worse than misgendering a tranny. At root, though, he blames incels, who, like trans children, do not exist and are a Democrat fever dream. Leftards are eager to slash and poison the latter – and incarcerate then genocide the former. (A Democrat tells herself she believes incels are real while detransitioners aren’t.)

And here we have the entire purpose of Algospeak: Running cover for surveillance, oppression, and ultimate imprisonment and extirpation of enemies of the régime.

Power comes from the barrel of a Wikipedia

I will recapitulate the conventional wisdom of how the régime targets its enemies. It would be gauche, and would leave too much of a paper trail, for a government to simply publish an enemies list, à la those of banned persons under apartheid (“did nothing wrong”). Instead, the régime funds NGOs and think-tanks that carry out oppo research and publish shocking, indeed incendiary, findings concerning dangerous new forms of extremism.

The lamestream media, often government-funded (cf. Canada’s), then publishes objective reportage on these independent, non-partisan findings. Allied pressure groups demand the government step in, not least via legislation and always, without fail, involving censorship. Wikipedia then duly cites press coverage and demands from activists.

The original oppo research tends to be simply wrong. Subjects named are given no right of reply, and indeed are quite often not even cited in press coverage (cf. Electoral Justice Protest; Freedom Convoy). That’s been going on for decades, with pro-life groups almost never quoted in press coverage about abortion. In many ongoing court cases, defence lawyers aren’t even queried and cited.

Algospeak elevates meretricious and tendentious calls for censorship, and worse, from the realm of Adam Aleksic’s intangible online poastings to the solidity of a printed book.

Algospeak has no other purpose than to provide cover for suppression of enemies of the régime, whom Aleksic tells himself are also his own enemies and those of Democrat client groups.

An ill-produced book

Algospeak is about as well put together or well-put-together as a lamestream-press book could be expected to be.

• As usual, there was no actual “design”: MS Word copy was flowed into existing templates. (In all likelihood, on Windows.)

• Of course they’re using the freebie Adobe typeface Minion. (It came with software like Photoshop and InDesign, and mighty Knopf never spent a dime on it.)

• Everyone is unable to typeset endnote numbers as real superscript characters, a distinction designer Marisa Nakasone will not comprehend.

  Obviously the book uses failed typography and copy-editing (nospace-emdash-nospace, numbers rendered as words). No, they couldn’t render a nonbreaking hyphen in a sequence like “‑maxxing” (with quotes).

  I will give them credit for being willing to begin a sentence with a numeral, viz in the lexeme 4chan. 2 + 2 = 4 no matter how fervently a sorority girl doing a summer internship in the publishing biz thinks two plus two equals four.

• Worse, in a book discussing emoji, said characters are rendered in black and white. Making emoji render in colour is what led to enabling colour OpenType fonts in the first place. They are incomprehensible in monochrome.

• The E‑book is full of markup errors (punctuation after an italicized lexeme also errantly italicized), and – wait for it! – cannot even render an emoji:

  Once the algorithm caught onto the <span class="figure_inline_small"><img alt="Palestine flag emoji" class="height_0-7em" id="page_27_img3" src="../images/007_c001_art_14.jpg"/></span> emoji being used in “highly controversial” contexts, the game of Whac-A-Mole naturally continued. People began replacing the flag with the watermelon emoji, <span class="figure_inline_small"><img alt="watermelon emoji" class="height_0-7em" id="page_27_img4" src="../images/007_c001_art_15.jpg"/></span>, in reference to its historical representation of Palestine during the Six-Day War.

  I had to de-hack and unmangle the XML of Chapter 6 just to make the provided excerpt readable and valid.

Fact-checking questions

I told Aleksic I am the keeper of the right-wing lexicon and asked: “Looking at Chapter 6 of your book, given how many times you describe ostensibly-incel-originated lexemes as dangerous or extreme, how far are you personally willing to go to enact a final solution to the incel danger once and for all?”

I went further:

A bulbhead walks up to you bearing a small box clad in a discarded hijab. From another direction, an AGP walks up to you proffering another box seemingly wrapped in gold lamé. (That’s actually a pair of his ex-wife’s panties he cut up and taped into place.)

One of those boxen contains a gun that, whenever fired and irrespective of place or target, results in the assassination of President Trump. The other box holds a giant red button, akin to “the iconic Staples® Easy Button,” that, when pressed, instantly genocides all your political enemies à la Y: The Last Man. (Here “political enemies” includes everyone the Democrat Party instructed you, explicitly or not, were in that category.)

Which box do you pick?

Twitter DMs and direct electronic mail did not elicit a response.

Aleksic enables censorship

A leftist cannot function as a descriptive linguist for the simple reason ze cannot bring zimself to hear in zis internal monologue, let alone utter or render, the word nigger. This truism remains such even though Aleksic pretends to document the myriad ways in which Kids Today self-bowdlerize for “censorship avoidance.”

Algospeak mentions censorship dozens of times, in fact. But Adam Aleksic is the enabler of the censor.

Going beyond author physiognomy

The designer is a Japanese-American female. (Where is Chip Kidd when we need him? Actually, having met him, he’d have been worse.)

Who’s the editor? Editrix, actually: Vietnamese-American Quynh Do. (“The daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Quynh was raised in the Midwest, [was] educated at Yale University, and now lives in Brooklyn.” Even Knopf’s editor bios contain copy errors.)

Aleksic’s agent? Rachel Vogel of Dunow(,) Carlson & Lerner, Fifth Avenue.

No longhouse, least of all this one, has any ability, at a biological level, to publish accurate and truthful coverage of non-progressive linguistics. Nor would they have any willingness to do so. They’d never eat lunch in this town again.

---

Posted: 2026.02.11