I learned a new word.

I was reading "Dave Chappelle’s Endless Feedback Loop" (New York Magazine), a review of the new Netflix special, "Closer," which we watched last night. And I get to this:

He speaks about Black and queer struggles as if they are strictly in competition, not always entangled. He has the textbook edgelord ally’s arrogance. He swears he knows how to fix things for you, but he’s just asking for you to take up less space, to usher in progress by giving other people time to come around to you.

Edgelord. I had to look it up. Urban Dictionary says:

A poster on an Internet forum, (particularly 4chan) who expresses opinions which are either strongly nihilistic, ("life has no meaning," or Tyler Durden's special snowflake speech from the film Fight Club being probably the two main examples) or contain references to Hitler, Nazism, fascism, or other taboo topics which are deliberately intended to shock or offend readers. 

The term "edgelord," is a noun, which came from the previous adjective, "edgy," which described the above behaviour. 

Nietzsche was an edgelord before it was cool.

Here's a Reddit discussion from 2 years ago that uses the word in talking about Chappelle:

Watching all of his latest specials have made me realize how much reputation gets you in comedy. His jokes are on par with Reddit edgelords and the audience laughs at every single sentence even when there's no punchline. He could say anything and the audience would laugh. Like even he said before comedy is way too easy for him. Objectively his jokes aren't creative or even funny most of the time. And also the way he references pop culture every 5 seconds like an old ass man makes me cringe every time.

Ah! And there's "cringe" too. I was just saying this morning that we were having a real-world conversation about the new Chappelle show that got all caught up in the meaning of that word. It would have been funny if we'd gotten tied up in the word "edgelord," but I didn't know that word this morning. 

I looked up "edgelord" in the NYT archive, because that's kind of a test for me of how much of a word some supposed word actually is. 

I found this from 2019, "The White-Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers/The New Zealand attacker wanted you to think white people face existential decline. They don’t":

The white-extinction theory plays well online. It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).

And from just last month, "If Gawker Is Nice, Is It Still Gawker?/'I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives,' says its top editor, Leah Finnegan, who once insulted a baby in a headline": 

“The internet is both too mean and too nice for Gawker now,” my old colleague Sara Yasin says. “If you’re mean, you have to be super edgelord mean, or else you have to be super earnest.” 

From last February, "Soccer Isn’t Blameless in Its Culture of Abuse/Leagues and teams have urged Twitter and Facebook to address the unfiltered hatred spewed on their platforms. But the game indulges, and sometimes even directs, that same outrage":

In the case of social media, it is not just that the anonymity of the screen gives free rein to users who wish to spread their sincere and repulsive hatred, but that its timbre incentivizes the breaking of taboos: edgelords seeking clout by saying the unsayable. 

I love the use of "timbre" and "edgelords" in the same sentence. I might write "timbre" one of these days, but it's hard to imagine me ever deploying "edgelords." I'm just marking the occasion of learning how to read it. Wait. No. I'm inspired to use it. I have a question: Are any of you people edgelords? 

And — sorry to extend this post — I did proceed to search for "edgelord" in The New Yorker. This is a backup test to see how much of a word it is. I found the word in the title of an article — "Jordan Wolfson’s Edgelord Art/Can an artist who built a career on provocation survive a newly sensitive age?" (March 2020):

He affronted men and offended women. “It’s to extend his brand of Edgelord Art,” an artist who knows him well told me. “It’s almost laughably banal—another rich white person exercising their place in the world to do better at the expense of other people’s health. It’s by-the-book sociopathy. Sociopaths are people who regard people as objects.”

And I found it in "The Uneasy Afterlife of 'A Confederacy of Dunces'/The book has long been considered a classic. But, forty years after its publication, its virtues seem inextricable from its flaws" (January 2021):

And here is Ignatius at his most horrifyingly, presciently archetypal, watching a film starring an ingénue with whom he’s obsessed: “How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!” Early in the novel, Ignatius tells us, “I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.” In 1968, Toole’s hero mystified one of the country’s finest editors of fiction. In 1980, he seemed harmless. Forty years later, this red-pilled malcontent calling for a theofascist revival seems something else entirely. Ignatius J. Reilly—the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all—was no anachronism. He was a prediction.