A recent tweet from the US Department of Defense boasts about the killing capabilities of the US military as follows: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing”. To many, that will sound as indecipherable as the teenagers that discuss “high-tier Beckys” or the New York Times warning of “Tate-pilled” boys.

Many will have now seen the 6 February tweet that went globally viral, viewed more than 24m times and since discussed in endless analyses and explainers:

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 then SMV chadfishing in the club?

In 2026, this kind of language is appearing more frequently, from America’s most prominent newspaper to the highest tiers of the US government. Why has this disfigured way of speaking become so normalized?

It starts with the rise of “incels”, a growing cohort of men who are “involuntarily celibate” and think women are to blame. Propagated via online forums like 4chan – the source of much gen Z slang – it has made its way to the mainstream thanks to a combination of algorithms, in-jokes and a Trump administration keyed into the language of these communities.

In recent months, the rise of Braden Peters, AKA Clavicular, the subject of the viral tweet, has forced the outside world to reckon with the head-spinning breadth of the vocabulary, and begin spotting the way it has entered even the offline parts of our culture. “I’ve been tracking trending incel language since 2022 and I am seeing more of a spike in the past few months than I think I have in my entire career,” says Adam Aleksic, a linguist and author of the 2025 book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.

Current slang has two main sources, Aleksic says: African American Vernacular English and 4chan, the anonymous online forum where incel communities has thrived. The slang becomes a way of demonstrating “in-group proficiency”, Aleksic says.

Daria Bahtina, a lecturer in linguistics at UCLA, agrees: “The density of the vocabulary is not accidental,” she writes in an email. “Highly specific, rapidly evolving slang creates in-group cohesion by making comprehension contingent on being ‘in the loop’.” The same applies to meme culture as a whole. “I’ve had gen Z students tell me that if they step away from platforms for a month, they need time to ‘re-learn’ what certain references mean,” she says. “Opacity is built into the system.” It can also make it difficult to pull someone out of the “cultlike” community, Aleksic says. “It’s harder for an outsider to relate to you, to convince you to leave inceldom, because they’re not even speaking your language.”

Rise of the ‘looksmaxxers’

Incels overlap significantly with another online grouping: “looksmaxxers”. Clavicular apparently takes his nickname from the width of his clavicle (19.5in) which he believes is a sign of beauty. He has been called the “first star” of the looksmaxxing community.

Looksmaxxers are men who prioritize their appearance above all else, and are willing to take extreme measures to maximize it. Clavicular’s fame, built on lengthy live streams and social media, is tied to the alarming lengths he’s been willing to go for his looks: he claims that he takes methamphetamine to reduce his appetite and has endorsed hitting one’s own face with a hammer to achieve optimal attractiveness. He has also sung Kanye West’s Heil Hitler with Andrew Tate and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, seemed to hit someone with his truck on a live stream, and frequently used the N-word – though he told the Times it was “dumb” to believe the looksmaxxing community, which appears to prize whiteness in its search for physical perfection, was racist.

Incels and looksmaxxers exist in communities that are rife with misogyny and this reflects in the slang terms they’ve developed. “Foids”, for instance, are female humanoids, or what others might call women. (“Moids” is the male form, for lower-tier men.) Looksmaxxers are pervaded by a nihilistic “blackpill” mentality, Aleksic says, believing that physical appearance alone determines sexual success.

“Curiosity is one of the most proven hooks for any kind of social media content. So if you can make someone say ‘What the fuck?’, that’s a successful social media post,” says Aidan Walker, a researcher and writer on internet culture.

So – a brief translation of the viral tweet, via Aleksic and others: “Jestergooning” combines the terms “jestermaxxing” – trying to enhance your attractiveness by being funny – and “gooning”, which has its origins in masturbation but can also refer more broadly to showing mind-numbing behavior. “Munting” involves doing unattractive things, such as jaw exercises, to improve your appearance in the long term, while “mogging” is emasculating other men through your superior attractiveness. “SMV” is sexual market value, and “chadfishing” involves tricking people into thinking you’re more attractive than you are.

So, the tweet in plain (and offensive) English would read:

Clavicular was being silly when some female subhumans agitated him. Is it better to ignore the female subhumans while joking around and emasculating the lower-class men around him, or to pretend to be a guy with a higher sexual market value in the club?

Clavicular makes more than $100,000 monthly by streaming, but in Walker’s view, it’s not just about the money: virality is a social currency of its own. “Nowadays, to be popular is measured by engagement from friends in the form of text messages, likes, followers, and Snap streaks,” Walker writes. All this, he says in an interview, “becomes the literal evidence you have of your own existence, your impact, your value” – part of a “desperate quest for legibility”.

Why the Trump administration says it’s ‘homelandmaxxing’

That thirst for virality has helped terms like looksmaxxing move from the incel world to the mainstream, to the point where the “-maxxing” suffix has become unavoidable. This month, for example, the homeland security department recently told John Oliver it was “homelandmaxxing by removing illegal aliens”. As Nitsuh Abebe writes in the Times, many users of the term won’t know its incel associations. But Walker figures Trump’s social media team probably does. “A lot of these Trump administration guys, they certainly didn’t learn that word in the past few weeks,” he says. Instead, they are “thirtysomething-year-olds who were those 4chan forum kids back in the early 2010s”.

Looksmaxxers and the administration are aligned in their embrace of a brutal form of masculinity – and contempt for institutions and empathy. “You’re hitting yourself in the face with a hammer. That feels very manly. It’s very strong,” Walker says. When that behavior racks up views online, it’s proof of “how bullshit your opponents are” – how bullshit “every mom, teacher, guidance counselor, therapist in America really is, and that’s who they see themselves as against: that institutional voice”.

Clavicular’s political views are difficult to classify, if they exist at all. He has said he would vote for Gavin Newsom for president “100 times over” in a race with JD Vance, purely based on his appearance: Vance is “subhuman … whereas Newsom is like a six-foot-three Chad” who “mogs”, he told the Daily Wire. That nihilistic take “reflects that disillusionment that all politics is BS. And I think Trump has always kind of fed on that,” Walker says.

Should those of us who tend to support moms, teachers and therapists be concerned about the mainstreaming of looksmaxxing language? Writing about the word “foid” in 2023, for instance, Aleksic thought it would never reach the mainstream: it was a “hard slur” against women whose usage was simply too grotesque. Now, however, “it’s taken on this ironic usage that didn’t used to exist,” he says.

In a recent Atlantic article, the writer Charlie Warzel dubs nihilism “the new lingua franca of the internet”: “A kind of post-ironic fatalism that was once endemic to seedy message boards has bled into the broader culture, changing how people communicate.” The language of 4chan, inceldom and looksmaxxing, in which nothing matters but clicks and sexual market value, is a key part of all this. Are we doomed to live in a meaningless digital void?

“I don’t think algorithms or AI or social media have to go down that route,” Walker says. “Different choices could be made.” “I think that there’s a way that we can maybe bake care into some of these structures, bake agency and autonomy into them,” he adds. “Because a lot of people are just sitting around drowning in a pool of slop, and there’s nobody helping them.”