Do you remember where you were when Clavicular got brutally framemogged by an ASU frat leader? Were you stressmaxxing when his cortisol was spiked by a group of jestergooning gymcels, while he was chadfishing at the club? Do these words mean absolutely nothing to you? Congratulations, you might not be chronically online! Maybe stop reading now, to avoid falling deeper down the rabbit hole.

In recent weeks, the “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular (real name Braden Peters) has been the subject of a series of viral memes on social media. Revolving around clips from his Kick livestreams or TikTok videos, these memes lean into the esoteric language of the controversial subculture, which frequently features regressive views toward women, as well as dangerous – and frequently debunked – ‘self-improvement’ practices like bone-smashing. As a result, you end up with X posts like this one: “Clavicular was mid jestergooning when a group of Foids came and spiked his Cortisol levels 😭Is Ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging Moids more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club?”

In his 2025 book Algospeak, the internet linguist Adam Aleksic traces the origins of the slang associated with looksmaxxing back to the incel culture that proliferated on internet message boards like 4chan in the 2010s. As he continues to measure the popularity of words on the internet, though, he adds that they’ve never been more mainstream than today. “Right now,” he says, “I’m tracking more of these ‘incel’ words than ever before.”

As the language “trickles down” to mainstream platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram from deeper and darker corners of the internet, it has also evolved beyond its original meaning. When you eat pizza for dinner and say you’re “pizza-maxxing” or “pizza-pilled”, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a member of an alt-right community. In fact, many memes openly mock the subculture they’re imitating, even as they enjoy the playful language it’s created. But are they helping to normalise that language nevertheless, and the misogynistic views that come with it?

To answer that question, we need to figure out what some of the words actually mean, and how they might be changing.

WHERE DID LOOKSMAXXING SLANG COME FROM?

Platforms like 4chan – which hasn’t really recovered from a large-scale hack in April 2025 – are responsible for a disproportionate amount of internet culture. This has been attributed to their total anonymity, which makes them a safe haven for edgelords, the alt-right, and political movements like Anonymous. But anonymity has another effect, says Aleksic: “To show that users are in the in-group, they have to demonstrate a proficiency in the shared slang. So they come up with new words to signal to each other that they are not normies. Then, the group becomes obscure to outsiders and reinforces this kind of cultlike hierarchy.”

Given their controversial ideas, it’s easy to see why looksmaxxers would want to hide behind a veil of cultish slang and secret codes. Among a broader landscape of “blackpill” communities, many have migrated to even more obscure forums since 4chan’s decline, where they can continue to spread medical misinformation and hate speech without fear of IRL consequences. Then again, openly right-wing figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes – both Clavicular collaborators, by the way – seem to be doing just fine on X.

WHAT DO ANY OF THE WORDS ACTUALLY MEAN?

Because it’s designed to separate the in-group from the normies, slang changes fast. As it hits mainstream platforms, the meaning also “broadens a lot”, says Aleksic. Take, for example, the word “gooning”, which has gone from describing a very specific practice of prolonged masturbation to acting as a catch-all for all kinds of obsessive or ‘degenerate’ behaviours. Another example of this shift is the word “munting”, a word that’s often used in tandem with “mogging” (dominating other men by appearing more physically attractive) but originally described a graphic necrophilic act (I’ll let you look that one up for yourselves).

There’s one word that even Aleksic thought too extreme to ever go mainstream: “Foid.” Short for “femoid”, this essentially conveys the idea that women should be treated as subhuman. When he first encountered it on blackpill messageboards, Aleksic says: “It was just a straight-up slur. It was used with such contempt and disgust. Now, it’s being used in this ironic, cheeky way. It’s layered in irony.” Of course, that doesn’t mean we should be too quick to forget where it came from.

HOW DOES IT REACH THE MAINSTREAM?

Today’s media landscape is messy, and the boundaries between different networks are very porous. Case in point: the Clavicular memes that arrive on our timeline often feature slang from niche internet forums, popularised via Reddit, repeated on streaming platforms like Kick, and clipped to be reposted on mainstream sites like X. 

If this is the circulatory system for memes and ideas, language is the virus. “It’s transmitted from a patient zero to another patient, and so on,” suggests Aleksic. “When you go back and do an epidemiological analysis of how Gen Z slang broke contagion, the patient zero is almost always African-American English or 4chan, or something adjacent to it.” And, just like a virus, the higher nodes in the network have an outsized influence on the nodes further down the chain. As each person spreads the ‘virus’ to multiple others, it spreads exponentially, which might explain how trends like looksmaxxing slang seem to explode into public discourse all at once.

“If you can make the goofiest combination of words on Twitter [or X], you’re going viral,” says Aleksic. Looksmaxxing slang definitely lends itself to that. As pointed out by commentators on its recent ascent, like the writer Damilare Sonoiki, many of the phrases “immediately make sense” despite sounding like total nonsense, and lots of the words are easy to adapt to pretty much any scenario you can imagine. Someone accidentally put cheese on Clavicular’s burger? He got “dairygooned” while “bingewhoppermaxxing”. UK politics is in shambles? “Starmer announcement-mogged the resignpilled pressoids and journocels by staymaxxing.” Your dog bit an innocent child? Try: “My pitbull just teethmogged this toddloid, and now she’s sobmaxxing.”

“Clavicular is kind of like the human 6-7”

It goes deeper than just goofy-sounding tweets, though. The limits of social media changed around the second election of Donald Trump, as Meta relaxed its hate speech rules and got rid of DEI programs, and Elon Musk continued to transform X into a cesspit of right-wing ideology. “I started noticing a lot more overt racism and dog whistles,” Aleksic notes. Meanwhile, the incentives of the platforms themselves shifted, once they no longer had to worry about ‘political correctness’. Today, he adds, “there’s a tendency of these platforms to allow any discourse that makes them money, so long as it does not overtly breach the words they cannot say.” 

This means figures like Clavicular and slurs like “foid” are now pretty much fair game, and attention-hungry posters will piggyback on their popularity whether they believe in the underlying ideology or not. In this sense, “Clavicular is kind of like the human 6-7” – an empty container for engagement-maxxing.

WHAT’S THE HARM IN A BIT OF JESTERGOONING?

You don’t have to be a misogynistic freak to joke in the group chat that wagecels are spiking your cortisol levels on the Tube home. Many of the memes being shared online actually draw their humour from mocking the way looksmaxxers talk. “This also takes the in-group dynamic away from their language,” Aleksic points out. But this comes at a cost. “The tradeoff is that you normalise that rhetoric in society.”

This is a case of widening the Overton window – the range of words, discourse, and ideas it’s deemed acceptable to share in public. “There’s a reason that when I was writing Algospeak, only the words ‘-maxxing’, ‘-pill’, and ‘sigma’ were really popular, and ‘foid’ wasn’t popular yet,” he adds. “It’s because we needed to reach a cultural moment where people were aware enough of the other incel terms for that language to reach the mainstream.” Now it has crossed that threshold (drenched in irony or not) it remains to be seen what other buried slurs could be unleashed.

Like many problems we face today, we can place a lot of blame for the popularity of looksmaxxing on social media sites run by the likes of Elon and Mark Zuckerberg, whose algorithms are designed to optimise engagement above all else. Barring a radical change in how Big Tech operates, though, it doesn’t seem possible to change their bad incentives anytime soon, and hateful language will keep making headlines. “There’s no metric for kindness online,” Aleksic says. “So ragebait will always spread more than a compassionate idea.”

On a personal level, though, we can exercise a bit more influence. For one, Aleksic says, we can be more aware of our epistemic firewall. This is essentially “a barrier in our brains” that prevents ideas from spreading to us. If someone openly admits that “foid” is a slur for women, you’re probably not going to want to use it, he explains. “So the epistemic firewall is high.” But humour can act like a Trojan horse, allowing harmful ideas to sneak through (see also: right-wing politicians using dumb memes and AI slop to spread their regressive ideas). 

As well as keeping in mind our own brain’s security features, it’s worth considering your intended audience when engaging with content online. “It’s ok to tell my friends I’m burrito-maxxing,” Aleksic adds, “but if I’m on the [public] internet, am I potentially normalising harmful ideas? I don’t know. At least be aware of what you’re doing, and where the ideas are coming from. Engage with deliberate precision.” And maybe try to avoid using slurs either way.