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An edgelord is someone, typically on the Internet, who tries to impress or shock by posting exaggerated opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.[1][2][3][4]

According to the Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, the first known usage with this meaning was in 2015.[1] It was added to Webster's in September 2023.[1] Webster gave the following example:

We decided to watch It's A Wonderful Life and my dad said, "Every year I wait for Jimmy Stewart to jump off that bridge but he never does it"—merry Xmas from the original edgelord.[5]

Edgelords were characterised by author and journalist Rachel Monroe in her account of criminal behaviour, Savage Appetites:

...internet cynics lumped the online Nazis together with the serial killer fetishists and the dumbest goths and dismissed them all as edgelords: kids who tried to be scary online. I thought of most of these edgelords as basement-dwellers, pale faces lit by the glow of their computer screen, puffing themselves up with nihilism. An edgelord was a scrawny guy with a LARP-y vibe, possibly wearing a cloak, dreaming of omnipotence. Or a girl with excessive eyeliner and lots of Tumblr posts about self-harm. The disturbing content posted by edgelords was undermined by its predictability...[6]

It is frequently associated with the forum site 4chan.[7][8][9] The renegade rhetoric of the edgelord is often intentionally employed by the far-right to troll leftist targets.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Edgelord (noun)". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. September 2023.
  2. ^ Jeannerod, Marinette (2019). "Les stéréotypes mis à mal sur la Toile". Hermès, la Revue. 83 (83): 212–222. doi:10.3917/herm.083.0212. S2CID 201536274.
  3. ^ a b Nilan, Pam (10 May 2021). Young People and the Far Right. Springer Nature. p. 4. ISBN 978-981-16-1811-6.
  4. ^ Poole, Steven (3 October 2019). "Edgelord". A Word for Every Day of the Year. Quercus. ISBN 978-1-78747-859-6.
  5. ^ "Words We're Watching: Doing the Work of the 'Edgelord'". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster.
  6. ^ Monroe, Rachel (2020). Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession. Scribner. p. 205. ISBN 9781501188893.
  7. ^ Goldsmith, Kenneth (2019). "Zoë and the trolls". In Colombo, Gary (ed.). Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins Press. p. 293. ISBN 9781319056360.
  8. ^ Bissell, Tom (5 January 2021). "The Uneasy Afterlife of 'A Confederacy of Dunces'". The New Yorker. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
  9. ^ McHugh, Calder (26 April 2022). "Why progressives hate Elon Musk". Politico. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgelord